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ESSAYS    ON    ART 


ESSAYS    ON    ART 


BY 

A.  GLUTTON-BROCK 


NEW    YORK 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 

1920 


LreRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

SANTA  BARBARA 


PREFACE 

THESE  essays,  reprinted  from  the  Times 
Literary  Supplement  with  a  few  addi- 
tions and  corrections,  are  not  all  entirely  or 
directly  concerned  with  art ;  but  even  the  last 
one — Waste  or  Creation  ? — does  bear  on  the 
question,  How  are  we  to  improve  the  art  of 
our  own  time  ?  After  years  of  criticism  I  am 
more  interested  in  this  question  than  in  any 
other  that  concerns  the  arts.  Whistler  said 
that  we  could  not  improve  it ;  the  best  we 
could  do  for  it  was  not  to  think  about  it,  I 
have  discussed  that  opinion,  as  also  the  con- 
trary opinion  of  Tolstoy,  and  the  truth  that 
seems  to  me  to  lie  between  them.  If  these 
essays  have  any  unity,  it  is  given  to  them  by 
my  behef  that  art,  like  other  human  activities, 
is  subject  to  the  will  of  man.  We  cannot 
«iuse  men  of  artistic  genius  to  be  born ;  but 
we  can  provide  a  public,  namely,  ourselves,  for 
the  artist,  who  will  encourage  him  to  be  an 
b  V 


Essays  on  Art 

artist,  to  do  his  best,  not  his  worst.  I  believe 
that  the  quality  of  art  in  any  age  depends,  not 
upon  the  presence  or  absence  of  individuals  of 
genius,  but  upon  the  attitude  of  the  public 
towards  art. 

Because  of  the  decline  of  all  the  arts,  especi- 
ally the  arts  of  use,  which  began  at  the  end  of 
the  eighteenth  century  and  has  continued  up 
to  our  own  time,  we  are  more  interested  in  art 
than  any  people  of  the  past,  with  the  interest 
of  a  sick  man  in  health.  To  say  that  this 
interest  must  be  futile  or  mischievous  is  to 
deny  the  will  of  man  in  one  of  the  chief  of 
human  activities;  but  it  often  is  denied  by 
those  who  do  not  understand  how  it  can  be 
applied  to  art.  We  cannot  make  artists 
directly ;  no  government  office  can  determine 
their  training ;  still  less  can  any  critic  tell 
them  how  they  ought  to  practise  their  art. 
But  we  can  all  aim  at  a  state  of  society  in 
which  they  will  be  encouraged  to  do  their  best, 
and  at  a  state  of  mind  in  which  we  ourselves 
shall  learn  to  know  good  from  bad  and  to 
prefer  the  good.  At  present  we  have  neither 
the  state  of  society  nor  the  state  of  mind ;  and 
we  can  attain  to  both  not  by  connoisseurship, 
vi 


Preface 

not  by  an  anxiety  to  like  the  right  thing  or  at 
least  to  buy  it,  but  by  learning  the  difference 
between  good  and  bad  workmanship  and  de- 
sign in  objects  of  use.  Anyone  can  do  that, 
and  can  resolve  to  pay  a  fair  price  for  good 
workmanship  and  design ;  and  only  so  will  the 
arts  of  use,  and  all  the  arts,  revive  again.  For 
where  the  public  has  no  sense  of  design  in  the 
arts  of  use,  it  will  have  none  in  the  "  fine  arts." 
To  aim  at  connoisseurship  when  you  do  not 
know  a  good  table  or  chair  from  a  bad  one  is 
to  attempt  flying  before  you  can  walk.  So,  I 
think,  professors  of  art  at  Oxford  or  Cambridge 
should  be  chosen,  not  so  much  for  their  know- 
ledge of  Greek  sculpture,  as  for  their  success  in 
furnishing  their  own  houses.  What  can  they 
know  about  Greek  sculpture  if  their  own 
drawing-rooms  are  hideous  ?  I  believe  that 
the  notorious  fallibility  of  many  experts  is 
caused  by  the  fact  that  they  concern  them- 
selves with  the  fine  arts  before  they  have  had 
any  training  in  the  arts  of  use.  So,  if  we  are 
to  have  a  school  of  art  at  Oxford  or  Cambridge, 
it  should  put  this  question  to  every  pupil :  If 
you  had  to  build  and  furnish  a  house  of  your 
own,  how  would  you  set  about  it  ?  And  it 
vii 


Essays  on  Art 

should  train  its  pupils  to  give  a  rational  answer 
to  that  question.  So  we  might  get  a  public 
knowing  the  difference  between  good  and  bad 
in  objects  of  use,  valuing  the  good,  and  ready 
to  pay  a  fair  price  for  it. 

At  present  we  have  no  such  public.  A 
liberal  education  should  teach  the  difference 
between  good  and  bad  in  things  of  use,  includ- 
ing buildings,  Oxford  and  Cambridge  profess 
to  give  a  liberal  education  ;  but  you  have  only 
to  look  at  their  modem  buildings  to  see  that 
their  teachers  themselves  do  not  know  a  good 
building  from  a  bad  one.  They,  like  all  the 
rest  of  us,  think  that  taste  in  art  is  an 
irrational  mystery;  they  trust  in  the  expert 
and  usually  in  the  wrong  one,  as  the  ignorant 
and  superstitious  trust  in  the  wrong  priest. 
For  as  religion  is  merely  mischievous  unless  it 
is  tested  in  matters  of  conduct,  so  taste  is  mere 
pedantry  or  frivolity  unless  it  is  tested  on 
things  of  use.  These  have  their  sense  or  non- 
sense, their  righteousness  or  unrighteousness, 
which  anyone  can  learn  to  see  for  himself,  and, 
until  he  has  learned,  he  will  be  at  the  mercy  of 
charlatans. 

I  have  written  all  these  essays  as  a  member 
viii 


Preface 

of  the  public,  as  one  who  has  to  find  a  right 
attitude  towards  art  so  that  the  arts  may 
flourish  again.  The  critic  is  sure  to  be  a 
charlatan  or  a  prig,  unless  he  is  to  himself  not 
a  pseudo-artist  expounding  the  mysteries  of  art 
and  telling  artists  how  to  practise  them,  but 
simply  one  of  the  public  with  a  natural  and 
human  interest  in  art.  But  one  of  these 
essays  is  a  defence  of  criticism,  and  I  will  not 
repeat  it  here, 

A.   CLUTTON-BROCK 
July  30,  1919 
Farncombe,  Surrey 


IX 


CONTENTS 


"The  Adoration  of  the  Magi" 

Leonardo  da  Vinci 

The  Pompadour  in  Art 

An  Unpopular  Master 

A  Defence  of  Criticism 

The  Artist  and  his  Audience 

Wilfulness  and  Wisdom 

"The  Magic  Flute"     . 

Process  or  Person?     . 

The  Artist  and  the  Tradesman 

Professionalism  in  Art 

Waste  or  Creation?  . 


rAGB 

I 

13 
27 

37 

48 
58 

74 
86 

97 
no 
120 
132 


XI 


ESSAYS   ON   ART 


"  The  Adoration  of  the  Magi  ">£><> 

THERE  is  one  beauty  of  nature  and 
another  of  art,  and  many  attempts  have 
bieen  made  to  explain  the  difference  between 
them.  Signor  Croce's  theory,  now  much  in 
favour,  is  that  nature  provides  only  the  raw 
material  for  art.  The  beginning  of  the  artistic 
process  is  the  perception  of  beauty  in  nature ; 
but  an  artist  does  not  see  beauty  as  he  sees  a 
cow.  It  is  his  own  mind  that  imposes  on  the 
chaos  of  nature  an  order,  a  relation,  which  is 
beauty.  All  men  have  the  faculty,  in  some 
degree,  of  imposing  this  order ;  the  artist  only 
does  it  more  completely  than  other  men,  and 
he  owes  his  power  of  execution  to  that.  He 
can  make  the  beauty  which  he  has  perceived 
because  he  has  perceived  it  clearly ;  and  this 
perceiving  is  part  of  the  making. 

The  defect  of  this  theory  is  that   it   ends 
by  denying  that  very  difference  between  the 

A  I 


Essays  on  Art 

beauty  of  nature  and  the  beauty  of  art  which 
it  sets  out  to  explain.  If  the  artist  makes  the 
beauty  of  nature  in  perceiving  it,  if  it  is  pro- 
duced by  the  action  of  his  own  mind  upon  the 
chaos  of  reality,  then  it  is  the  very  same  beauty 
that  appears  in  his  art ;  and  if,  to  us,  the 
beauty  of  his  art  seems  different  from  the 
beauty  of  nature,  as  we  perceive  it,  it  irs  only 
because  we  have  not  ourselves  seen  the  beauty 
of  nature  as  completely  as  he  has,  we  have  not 
reduced  chaos  so  thoroughly  to  order.  It  is  a 
difference  not  of  kind,  but  of  degree ;  for  the 
artist  himself  there  is  no  difference  even  of 
degree.  What  he  makes  he  sees,  and  what  he 
sees  he  makes.  All  beauty  is  artistic,  and  to 
speak  of  natural  beauty  is  to  make  a  false 
distinction. 

Yet  it  is  a  distinction  that  we  remain  con- 
stantly aware  of.  In  spite  of  Signor  Croce 
and  all  the  subtlety  and  partial  truth  of  his 
theory,  we  do  not  believe  that  we  make  beauty 
when  we  see  it,  or  that  the  artist  makes  it 
when  he  sees  it.  Nor  do  we  believe  that  that 
beauty  which  he  makes  is  of  the  same  nature 
as  that  which  he  has  perceived  in  reality. 
Rather  he,  like  us,  values  the  beauty  which  he 
perceives  in  reality  because  he  knows  that  he 
has  not  made  it.  It  is  something,  independent 
2. 


"  The  Adoration  of  the  Magi  " 

of  himself,  to  which  his  own  mind  makes 
answer:  that  answer  is  his  art;  it  is  the 
passionate  value  expressed  in  it  which  gives 
beauty  to  his  art.  If  he  knew  that  the  beauty 
he  perceives  was  a  product  of  his  own  mind,  he 
could  not  value  it  so ;  if  he  held  Signor  Croce's 
theory,  he  would  cease  to  be  an  artist. 

And,  in  fact,  those  who  act  on  his  theory 
do  cease  to  be  artists.  Nothing  kills  art  so 
certainly  as  the  effort  to  produce  a  beauty  of 
the  same  kind  as  that  which  is  perceived  in 
nature.  In  the  beauty  of  nature,  as  we  per- 
ceive it,  there  is  a  perfection  of  workmanship 
which  is  perfection  because  there  is  no  work- 
manship. Natural  things  are  not  made,  but 
born ;  w  orks  of  art  are  made.  There  is  the 
essential  difference  between  them  and  between 
their  beauties.  If  a  work  of  art  tries  to  have 
the  finish  of  a  thing  bom,  not  made,  if  a  piece 
of  enamel  apes  the  gloss  of  a  butterfly's  wing, 
it  misses  the  peculiar  beauty  of  art  and  is  but 
an  inadequate  imitation  of  the  beauty  of  nature. 
That  beauty  of  the  butterfly's  wing,  which  the 
artist  like  all  of  us  perceives,  is  of  a  different 
kind  from  any  beauty  he  can  make ;  and  if  he 
is  an  artist  he  knows  it  and  does  not  try  to 
make  it.  But  all  the  arts,  even  those  which 
are  not  themselves  imitative,  are  always  being 

3 


Essays  on  Art 

perverted  by  the  attempt  to  imitate  the  finish 
of  nature.  There  is  a  vanity  of  craftsmanship 
in  Louis  Quinze  furniture,  in  the  later  Chinese 
porcelain,  in  modern  jewelry,  no  less  than  in 
Dutch  painting,  which  is  the  death  of  art.  All 
great  works  of  art  show  an  effort,  a  roughness, 
an  inadequacy  of  craftsmanship,  which  is  the 
essence  of  their  beauty  and  distinguishes  it 
from  the  beauty  of  nature.  As  soon  as  men 
cease  to  understand  this  and  despise  this  effort 
and  roughness  and  inadequacy,  they  demand 
from  art  the  beauty  of  nature  and  get  some- 
thing which  is  mostly  dead  nature,  not  living 
art. 

We  can  best  understand  the  difference 
between  the  two  kinds  of  beauty  if  we  consider 
how  beauty  steals  into  language,  that  art  which 
we  all  practise  more  or  less  and  in  which  it  is 
difficult,  if  not  impossible,  to  imitate  the  finish 
t-^  of  natural  beauty.  There  is  no  beauty  what- 
ever in  sentences  like  "  Trespassers  will  be 
prosecuted "  or  "  Pass  the  mustard,"  because 
they  say  exactly  and  completely  all  that  they 
'  have  to  say.  There  is  beauty  in  sentences  like 
"  The  bright  day  is  done,  And  we  are  for  the 
dark,"  or  "  After  life's  fitful  fever  he  sleeps 
well,"  because  in  them,  although  they  seem 
quite  simple,  the  poet  is  trying  to  say  a  thou- 

4 


"The  Adoration  of  the  Magi" 

sand  times  more  than  he  can  say.  It  is  the 
efiPort  to  do  something  beyond  the  power  of 
words  that  brings  beauty  into  them.  That  is 
the  very  nature  of  the  beauty  of  art,  which 
distinguishes  it  from  the  beauty  of  nature ;  it 
is  always  produced  by  the  effort  to  accomplish 
the  impossible,  and  what  the  artist  knows  to 
be  impossible.  Whenever  that  effort  ceases, 
whenever  the  artist  sets  himself  a  task  that  he 
can  accomplish,  a  task  of  mere  skill,  then  he 
ceases  to  be  an  artist,  because  he  no  longer 
experiences  reality  in  the  manner  necessary  to 
an  artist.  The  great  poet  is  aware  of  some 
excellence  in  reality  so  intensely  that  it  is  to 
him  beauty ;  for  all  excellence  when  we  are 
intensely  aware  of  it  is  beauty  to  us.  There 
is  that  truth  in  Croce's  theory.  Our  percep- 
tion of  beauty  does  depend  upon  the  intensity 
of  our  perception  of  excellence.  But  that 
intensity  of  perception  remains  perception, 
and  does  not  make  what  it  perceives.  That 
the  poet  and  every  artist  knows ;  and  his  art 
is  not  merely  an  extension  of  the  process  of 
perception,  but  an  attempt  to  express  his  own 
value  for  that  excellence  which  he  has  perceived 
as  beauty.  It  is  an  answer  to  that  beauty,  a 
worship  of  it,  and  is  itself  beautiful  because  it 
makes  no  effort  to  compete  with  it. 

5 


Essays  on  Art 

Thus  in  the  beauty  of  art  there  is  always 
value  and  wonder,  always  a  reference  to  another 
beauty  different  in  kind  from  itself;  and  we 
too,  if  we  are  to  see  the  beauty  of  art,  must 
share  the  same  value  and  wonder.  To  enter 
that  Kingdom  of  Heaven  we  must  become 
little  children  as  the  artist  himself  does.  Art 
is  the  expression  of  a  certain  attitude  towards 
reality,  an  attitude  of  wonder  and  value,  a 
recognition  of  something  greater  than  man ; 
and  where  that  recognition  is  not,  art  dies. 
In  a  society  valuing  only  itself,  believing  that 
it  can  make  a  heaven  of  itself  out  of  its  own 
skiU  and  knowledge  and  wisdom,  the  difference 
between  the  beauty  of  nature  and  the  beauty 
of  art  is  no  longer  seen,  and  art  loses  all  its 
own  beauty.  The  surest  sign  of  corruption 
and  death  in  a  society  is  where  men  and  women 
see  the  best  life  as  a  life  without  wonder  or 
effort  or  failure,  where  labour  is  hidden  under- 
ground so  that  a  few  may  seem  to  live  in 
Paradise ;  where  there  is  perfect  finish  of  all 
things,  human  beings  no  less  than  their  clothes 
and  furniture  and  buildings  and  pictures; 
where  the  ideal  is  the  lady  so  perfectly  turned 
out  that  any  activity  whatever  would  mar  her 
perfection.  In  such  societies  the  artist  becomes 
a  slave.  He  too  must  produce  work  that  does 
6 


"The  Adoration  ot  the  Magi" 

not  seem  to  be  work.  He  must  express  no 
wonder  or  value  for  patrons  who  would  be 
ashamed  to  feel  either.  What  he  makes  must 
seem  to  be  born  and  not  made,  so  that  it  may 
fit  a  world  which  pretends  to  be  a  bom  Para- 
dise populated  by  cynical  angels  who  own 
allegiance  to  no  god.  In  such  a  world  art 
means,  beauty  means,  the  concealment  of  effort, 
the  pretence  that  it  does  not  exist ;  and  that 
pretence  is  the  end  of  art  and  beauty  in  all 
things  made  by  man.  There  is  a  close  con- 
nexion between  the  idea  of  life  expressed  in 
Aristotle'^s  ideal  man  and  the  later  Greek 
sculpture.  The  aim  of  that  sculpture,  as  of 
his  ideal  man,  was  proud  and  effortless  perfec- 
tion. Both  dread  the  confession  of  failure 
above  all  things  —  and  both  are  dull.  In 
Aristotle''s  age  art  had  started  upon  a  long 
decline,  which  ended  only  when  the  pretence 
of  perfection  was  killed,  both  in  art  and  in  life, 
by  Christianity.  Then  the  real  beauty  of  art, 
the  beauty  of  value  and  wonder,  superseded 
the  wearisome  imitation  of  natural  beauty ; 
and  it  is  only  lately  that  we  have  learnt  again 
to  prefer  the  real  beauty  to  the  false. 

Men  must  free  themselves  from  the  contempt 
of  effort  and  the  desire  to  conceal  it,  they  must 
be    content    with    the    perpetual,   passionate 
7 


Essays  on  Art 

failure  of  art,  before  they  can  see  its  beauty 
or  demand  that  beauty  from  the  artist.  When 
they  themselves  become  like  little  children, 
then  they  see  that  the  greatest  artists,  in  all 
their  seeming  triumphs,  are  like  little  children 
too.  For  in  Michelangelo  and  Beethoven  it 
is  not  the  arrogant,  the  accomplished,  the 
magnificent,  that  moves  us.  They  are  great 
men  to  us ;  but  they  achieved  beauty  because 
in  their  effort  to  achieve  it  they  were  little 
children  to  themselves.  They  impose  awe  on 
us,  but  it  is  their  own  awe  that  they  impose. 
It  is  not  their  achievement  that  makes  beauty, 
but  their  effort,  always  confessing  its  own 
failure ;  and  in  that  confession  is  the  beauty  ol 
art.  That  is  why  it  moves  and  frees  us ;  for  it 
frees  us  from  our  pretence  that  we  are  what 
we  would  be,  it  carries  us  out  of  our  own 
egotism  into  the  wonder  and  value  of  the  artist 
himself. 

Consider  the  beauty  of  a  tune.  Music  itself 
is  the  best  means  which  man  has  found  for 
confessing  that  he  cannot  say  what  he  would 
say ;  and  it  is  more  purely  and  rapturously 
beauty  than  any  other  form  of  art.  A  tune  is 
the  very  silencing  of  speech,  and  in  the  greatest 
tunes  there  is  always  the  hush  of  wonder  :  they 
seem  to  tell  us  to  be  silent  and  listen,  not  to 
8 


"The  Adoration  of  the  Magi" 

what  the  musician  has  to  say,  but  to  what  he 
cannot  say.  The  very  beauty  of  a  tune  is  in 
its  reference  to  something  beyond  all  expres- 
sion, and  in  its  perfection  it  speaks  of  a  perfec- 
tion not  its  own.  Pater  said  that  all  art  tries 
to  attain  to  the  condition  of  music.  That  is 
true  in  a  sense  different  from  what  he  meant. 
Art  is  always  most  completely  art  when  it 
makes  music's  confession  of  the  ineffable ;  then 
it  comes  nearest  to  the  beauty  of  music.  But 
when  it  is  no  longer  a  forlorn  hope,  when  it  is 
able  to  say  what  it  wishes  to  say  with  calm 
assurance,  then  it  has  ceased  to  be  art  and 
become  a  game  of  skill. 

Often  the  great  artist  is  imperious,  impatient, 
full  of  certainties ;  but  his  certainty  is  not  of 
himself;  and  he  is  impatient  of  the  failure  to 
recognize,  not  himself,  but  what  he  recognizes. 
Michelangelo,  Beethoven,  Tintoret,  would  snap 
a  critic's  head  off  if  he  did  not  see  what  they 
were  trying  to  do.  They  may  seem  sometimes 
to  be  arrogant  in  the  mere  display  of  power, 
yet  their  beauty  lies  in  the  sudden  change  from 
arrogance  to  humihty.  The  arrogance  itself 
bows  down  and  worships ;  the  very  muscle  and 
material  force  obey  a  spirit  not  their  own. 
They  are  lion-tamers,  and  they  themselves  are 
the  lions ;  out  of  the  strong  comes  forth  sweet- 

9 


Essays  on  Art 

ness,  and  it  is  all  the  sweeter  for  the  strength 
that  is  poured  into  it  and  subdued  by  it. 
What  is  the  difference,  as  of  different  worlds, 
between  Rubens  at  his  best  and  Tintoret  at  his 
best  ?  This :  that  Rubens  always  seems  to  be 
uplifted  by  his  own  power,  whereas  Tintoret 
has  most  power  when  he  forgets  it  in  wonder. 
When  he  bows  down  all  his  turbulence  in 
worship,  then  he  is  most  strong.  Rubens,  in 
the  "Descent  from  the  Cross,""  is  still  the 
supreme  drawing-master ;  and  painters  flocking 
to  him  for  lessons  pay  homage  to  him.  But, 
in  his  "  Crucifixion,"  it  is  Tintoret  himself  who 
pays  homage,  and  we  forget  the  master  in  the 
theme.  We  may  say  of  Rubens's  art,  in  a  new 
sense,  "  C'est  magnifique,  mais  ce  n'est  pas  la 
guerre."  The  greatest  art  is  not  magnificent, 
but  it  is  war,  desperate  and  without  trappings, 
a  war  in  which  victory  comes  through  the 
confession  of  defeat. 

Man,  if  he  tries  to  be  a  god  in  his  art,  makes 
a  fool  of  himself.  He  becomes  like  God,  he 
makes  beauty  like  God,  when  he  is  too  much 
aware  of  God  to  be  aware  of  himself.  Then 
only  does  he  not  set  himself  too  easy  a  task, 
for  then  he  does  not  make  his  theme  so  that  he 
may  accomplish  it ;  it  is  forced  upon  him  by 
his  awareness  of  God,  by  his  wonder  and  value 
lO 


"  The  Adoration  of  the   Magi  " 

for  ail  excellence  not  his  own.  So  in  all  the 
beauty  of  art  there  is  a  humility  not  only  of 
conception,  but  also  of  execution,  which  is  mere 
failure  and  ugliness  to  those  who  expect  to  find 
in  art  the  beauty  and  finish  of  nature,  who 
expect  it  to  be  born,  not  made.  They  are 
always  disappointed  by  the  greatest  works  of 
art,  by  their  inadequacy  and  strain  and  labour. 
They  look  for  a  proof  of  what  man  can  do  and 
find  a  confession  of  what  he  cannot  do ;  but 
that  confession,  made  sincerely  and  passion- 
ately, is  beauty.  There  is  also  a  serenity  in 
the  beauty  of  art,  but  it  is  the  serenity  of  self- 
surrender,  not  of  self-satisfaction,  of  the  saint, 
not  of  the  lady  of  fashion.  And  all  the  accom- 
plishment of  great  art,  its  infinite  superiority 
in  mere  skill  over  the  work  of  the  merely 
skilful,  comes  from  the  incessant  effort  of  the 
artist  to  do  mere  than  he  can.  By  that  he  is 
trained ;  by  that  his  work  is  distinguished  from 
the  mere  exclamation  of  wonder.  He  is  not 
content  to  applaud ;  he  must  also  worship,  and 
make  his  offerings  in  his  worship ;  and  they 
are  the  best  he  can  do.  It  was  not  only  the 
shepherds  who  came  to  the  birth  of  Christ ; 
the  wise  men  came  also  and  brought  their 
treasures  with  them.  And  the  art  of  mankind 
is  the  offering  of  its  wise  men,  it  is  the  adora- 
II 


Essays  on  Art 

tion  of  tKe  Magi,  who  are  one  with  the  simplest 
in  their  worship — 

Wise  men,  all  ways  of  knowledge  past, 
To  the  Shepherd's  wonder  come  at  last. 

But  they  do  not  lose  their  wisdom  in  their 
wonder.  When  it  passes  into  wonder,  when 
all  the  knowledge  and  skill  and  passion  of 
mankind  are  poured  into  the  acknowledgment 
of  something  greater  than  themselves,  then 
that  acknowledgment  is  art,  and  it  has  a 
beauty  which  may  be  envied  by  the  natural 
beauty  of  God  Himselt. 


12 


Leonardo  da  Vinci      <?>       <s>       o       y:> 

LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  is  one  of  the 
most  famous  men  in  history — as  a  man 
more  famous  than  Michelangelo  or  Shakespeare 
or  Mozart — because  posterity  has  elected  him 
the  member  for  the  Renaissance.  Most  great 
artists  live  in  what  they  did,  and  by  that  we 
know  them  ;  but  what  Leonardo  did  gets  much 
of  its  life  from  what  he  was,  or  rather  from 
what  he  is  to  us.  Of  all  great  men  he  is  the 
most  representative ;  we  cannot  think  of  him 
as  a  mere  individual,  eating  and  drinking, 
living  and  competing,  on  equal  terms  with 
other  men.  We  see  him  magnified  by  his  own 
legend  from  the  first,  with  people  standing 
aside  to  watch  and  whisper  as  he  passed  through 
the  streets  of  Florence  or  Milan.  "  There  he 
goes  to  paint  the  Last  Supper,"  they  said  to 
each  other ;  and  we  think  of  it  as  already  the 
most  famous  picture  in  the  world  before  it  was 
begun.  Every  one  knew  that  he  had  the  most 
famous  picture  in  his  brain,  that  he  was  born 

13 


Essays  on  Art 

to  paint  it,  to  initiate  the  High  Renaissance ; 
from  Giotto  onwards  all  the  painters  had  been 
preparing  for  that,  Florence  herself  had  been 
preparing  for  it.  It  makes  no  difference  that 
for  centuries  it  has  been  a  shadow  on  the 
wall ;  it  is  still  the  most  famous  painting  in 
the  world  because  it  is  the  masterpiece  of 
Leonardo.  There  was  a  fate  against  the 
survival  of  his  masterpieces,  but  he  has  sur- 
vived them  and  they  are  remembered  because 
of  him.  We  accept  him  for  himself,  like  the 
people  of  his  own  time,  who,  when  he  said 
he  could  perform  impossibilities,  believed  him. 
To  them  he  meant  the  new  age  which  could  do 
anything,  and  still  to  us  he  means  the  infinite 
capacities  of  man.  He  is  the  Adam  awakened 
whom  Michelangelo  only  painted ;  and,  if  he 
accomplished  but  little,  we  believe  in  him,  as 
in  mankind,  for  his  promise.  If  he  did  not 
fulfil  it,  neither  has  mankind ;  but  he  believed 
that  all  things  could  be  done  and  lived  a  great 
life  in  that  faith. 

Another  Florentine  almost  equals  him  in 
renown.  Men  watched  and  whispered  when 
Dante  passed  through  the  streets  of  Florence  ; 
but  Dante  lives  in  his  achievement,  Leonardo 
in  himself.  Dante  means  to  us  an  individual 
soul  quivering  through  a  system,  a  creed,  in- 
14 


Leonardo  da  Vinci 

herited  from  the  past,  Leonardo  is  a  spirit 
unstraitened ;  not  consenting  to  any  past  nor 
rebelling  against  it,  but  newborn  with  a  new- 
born universe  around  it,  seeing  it  without 
memories  or  superstitions,  without  inherited 
fears  or  pieties,  yet  without  impiety  or  irrever- 
ence. He  is  not  an  iconoclast,  since  for  him 
there  are  no  images  to  be  broken  ;  whatever  he 
sees  is  not  an  image  but  itself,  to  be  accepted 
or  rejected  by  himself;  what  he  would  do  he 
does  without  the  help  or  hindrance  of  tradition. 
In  art  and  in  science  he  means  the  same  thing, 
not  a  rebirth  of  any  past,  as  the  word  Renais- 
sance seems  to  imply,  but  freedom  from  all  the 
past,  life  utterly  in  the  present.  He  is  con- 
cerned not  with  what  has  been  thought,  or 
said,  or  done,  but  with  his  own  immediate  re- 
lation to  all  things,  with  what  he  sees  and  feels 
and  discovers.  Authority  is  nothing  to  him, 
whether  of  Galen  or  of  St.  Thomas,  of  Greek 
or  mediaeval  art.  In  science  he  looks  at  the 
fact,  in  art  at  the  object ;  nor  will  he  allow 
either  to  be  hidden  from  him  by  the  achieve- 
ments of  the  dead.  Giotto  had  struck  the 
first  blow  for  freedom  when  he  allowed  the 
theme  to  dictate  the  picture ;  Leonardo' 
allowed  the  object  to  dictate  the  drawing.  To 
him  the  fact  itself  is  sacred,  and  man  fulfils 

15 


Essays  on  Art 

himself    in    his    own   immediate    relation    to 
fact. 

All  those  who  react  and  rebel  against  the 
Renaissance  have  an  easy  case  against  its  great 
representative.  What  did  he  do  in  thought 
compared  with  St.  Thomas,  or  in  art  compared 
with  the  builders  of  Chartres  or  Bourges  ?  He 
filled  notebooks  with  sketches  and  conjectures ; 
he  modelled  a  statue  that  was  never  cast ;  he 
painted  a  fresco  on  a  wall,  and  with  a  medium 
so  unsuited  to  fresco  that  it  was  a  ruin  in  a  few 
years.  Even  in  his  own  day  there  was  a  doubt 
about  him ;  it  is  expressed  in  the  young 
Michelangelo's  sudden  taunt  that  he  could  not 
cast  the  statue  he  had  modelled.  Michelangelo 
was  one  of  those  who  see  in  life  always  the 
great  task  to  be  performed  and  who  judge  a 
man  by  his  performance ;  to  him  Leonardo 
was  a  dilettante,  a  talker ;  he  made  monu- 
ments, but  Leonardo  remains  his  own  monu- 
ment, a  prophecy  of  what  man  shall  be  when 
he  comes  into  his  kingdom.  With  him,  we 
must  confess,  it  is  more  promise  than  perform- 
ance ;  he  could  paint  "  The  Last  Supper " 
because  it  means  the  future ;  he  could  never,  in 
good  faith,  have  painted  "  The  Last  Judgment," 
for  that  means  a  judgment  on  the  past,  and  to 
him  the  past  is  nothing ;  to  him  man,  in  the 
i6 


Leonardo  da  Vinci 

future,  is  the  judge,  master,  enjoyer  of  his  own 
fate.  Compared  with  his,  Michelangelo"'s  mind 
was  still  mediaeval,  his  reproach  the  reproach 
of  one  who  cares  for  doing  more  than  for 
being,  and  certainly  Michelangelo  did  a  thou- 
sand times  more  ;  but  from  his  own  day  to  ours 
the  world  has  not  judged  Leonardo  by  his 
achievement.  As  Johnson  had  his  Boswell  so 
he  has  had  his  legend ;  he  means  to  us  not 
books  or  pictures,  but  himself.  In  his  own 
day  kings  bid  for  him  as  if  he  were  a  work 
of  art;  and  he  died  magnificently  in  France, 
making  nothing  but  foretelling  a  race  of  men 
not  yet  fulfilled. 

Before  Francis  Bacon,  before  Velasquez  or 
Manet,  he  prophesied  not  merely  the  new  artist 
or  the  new  man  of  science,  but  the  new  man 
who  is  to  free  himself  from  his  inheritance  and 
to  see,  feel,  think,  and  act  in  all  things  with 
the  spontaneity  of  God.  That  is  why  he  is  a 
legendary  hero  to  us,  with  a  legend  that  is  not 
in  the  past  but  in  the  future.  For  his  prophecy 
is  still  far  from  fulfilment ;  and  the  very  science 
that  he  initiated  tells  us  how  hard  it  is  for 
man  to  free  himself  from  his  inheritance.  It 
seems  strange  to  us  that  Leonardo  sang  hymns 
to  causation  as  if  to  God.  In  its  will  was  his 
peace  and  his  freedom. 

B  17 


Essays  on  Art 

O  marvellous  necessity,  thou  with  supreme  reason 
constrainest  all  efforts  to  be  the  direct  result  of  their 
causes,  and  by  a  supreme  and  irrevocable  law  every 
natural  action  obeys  thee  by  the  shortest  possible 
process. 

Who  would  believe  that  so  small  a  space  could 
contain  the  images  of  all  the  universe?  O  mighty 
process,  what  talent  can  avail  to  penetrate  a  nature 
such  as  thine  ?  What  tongue  will  it  be  that  can  unfold 
so  great  a  wonder  ?  Verily  none.  This  it  is  that 
guides  the  human  discourse  to  the  considering  of 
divine  things.^ 

To  Leonardo  causation  meant  the  escape 
from  caprice;  it  meant  a  secure  relation 
between  man  and  all  things,  in  which  man 
would  gain  power  by  knowledge,  in  which 
every  increase  of  knowledge  would  reveal  to 
him  more  and  more  of  the  supreme  reason. 
There  was  no  chain  for  him  in  cause  and  effect, 
no  unthinking  of  the  will  of  man.  Rather  by 
knowledge  man  would  discover  his  own  will 
and  know  that  it  was  the  universal  will.  So 
man  must  never  be  afraid  of  knowledge.  "  The 
eye  is  the  window  of  the  soul."  Like  Whitman 
he  tells  us  always  to  look  with  the  eye,  and  so 
to  confound  the  wisdom  of  ages.  There  is  in 
every  man's  vision  the  power  of  relating  himself 


^  The  sayings  of  Leonardo  quoted  in  this  article  are  taken 
from  Leonardo  da  Vinci's  Notebooks,  by  E.  M 'Curdy. 
(Duckworth,  1906.) 

18 


Leonardo  da  Vinci 

now  and  directly  to  reality  by  knowledge ;  and 
in  knowing  other  things  he  knows  himself.  By 
knowledge  man  changes  what  seemed  to  be  a 
compulsion  into  a  harmony ;  he  gives  up  his 
own  caprice  for  the  universal  will. 

That  is  the  religion  of  Leonardo,  in  art  as 
in  science.  For  him  the  artist  also  must  relate 
himself  directly  to  the  visible  world,  in  which 
is  the  only  inspiration  ;  to  accept  any  formula 
is  to  see  with  dead  men's  eyes.  That  has  been 
said  again  and  again  by  artists,  but  not  with 
Leonardo's  mystical  and  philosophical  con- 
viction. He  knew  that  it  is  vain  to  study 
Nature  unless  she  is  to  you  a  goddess  or  a  god ; 
you  can  learn  nothing  from  reality  unless  you 
adore  it,  and  in  adoring  it  he  found  his  freedom. 
How  different  is  this  doctrine  from  that  with 
which,  after  centuries  of  scientific  advance,  we 
intimidate  ourselves.  We  are  threatened  by 
a  creed  far  more  enslaving  than  that  of  the 
Middle  Ages.  If  the  Middle  Ages  turned  to 
the  past  to  learn  what  they  were  to  think  or 
to  do,  we  turn  to  the  past  to  learn  what  we 
are.  They  may  have  feared  the  new  ;  but  we 
say  that  there  is  no  new,  nothing  but  some 
combination  or  variation  of  the  old.  Causa- 
tion is  to  us  a  chain  that  binds  us  to  the  past, 
but  to  Leonardo  it  was  freedom ;   and  so  he 

19 


Essays  on  Art 

prophesies  a  freedom  that  we  may  attain  to 
not  by  denying  facts  or  making  myths,  but  by 
discovering  what  he  hinted — that  causation 
itself  is  not  compulsion  but  will,  and  our  will 
if,  by  knowledge,  we  make  it  ours. 

No  one  before  him  had  been  so  much  in  love 
with  reality,  whatever  it  may  be.  He  was 
called  a  sceptic,  but  it  was  only  that  he  pre- 
feiTed  reality  itself  to  any  tales  about  it ;  and 
his  religion,  his  worship,  was  the  search  for  the 
very  fact.  This,  because  he  was  both  artist 
and  man  of  science,  he  carried  further  than  any- 
one else,  pursuing  it  with  all  his  faculties.  In 
his  drawings  there  is  the  beauty  not  of  his 
character,  but  of  the  character  of  what  he 
draws ;  he  does  not  make  a  design,  but  finds 
it.  That  beauty  proves  him  a  Florentine — 
Diirer  himself  falls  short  of  it — but  it  is  the 
beauty  of  the  thing  itself,  discovered  and  in- 
sisted upon  with  the  passion  of  a  lover.  He 
draws  animals,  trees,  flowers,  as  Correggio 
draws  Antiope  or  lo ;  and  it  is  only  in  his 
drawings  now  that  he  speaks  clearly  to  us. 
The  "  Mona  Lisa  "  is  well  enough,  but  another 
hand  might  have  executed  the  painting  of  it. 
It  owes  its  popular  fame  to  the  smile  about 
which  it  is  so  easy  to  write  finely ;  but  in  the 
drawings  we  see  the  experiencing  passion  of 
20 


Leonardo  da  Vinci 

Leonardo  himself,  we  see  him  feeling,  as  in 
the  notebooks  we  see  him  thinking.  There  is 
the  eagerness  of  discovery  at  which  so  often  he 
stopped  short,  turning  away  from  a  task  to 
further  discovery,  living  always  in  the  moment, 
taking  no  thought  either  for  the  morrow  or  for 
yesterday,  unable  to  attend  to  any  business, 
even  the  business  of  the  artist,  seeing  life  not 
as  a  struggle  or  a  duty,  but  as  an  adventure  of 
all  the  senses  and  all  the  faculties.  He  is,  even 
with  his  pencil,  the  greatest  talker  in  the  world, 
but  without  egotism,  talking  always  of  what  he 
sees,  satisfying  himself  not  with  the  common 
appetites  and  passions  of  men,  but  with  his  one 
supreme  passion  for  reality.  If  Michelangelo 
thought  him  a  dilettante,  there  must  have  been 
in  his  taunt  some  envy  of  Leonardo's  freedom. 
Yet  once  at  least  Leonardo  did  achieve,  and 
something  we  should  never  have  expected  from 
his  drawings.  "The  Last  Supper"  is  but  a 
shadow  on  the  wall,  yet  still  we  can  see  its 
greatness,  which  is  the  greatness  of  pure  design, 
of  Giotto,  Masaccio,  Piero  della  Francesa. 
Goethe  and  others  have  found  all  kinds  of 
psychological  subtleties  in  it,  meanings  in  every 
gesture ;  but  what  we  see  now  is  only  space, 
grandeur,  a  supreme  moment  expressed  in  the 
relation  of  all  the  forms.  The  pure  music  of 
21 


Essays  on  Art 

the  painting  remains  when  the  drama  is  almost 
obliterated ;  and  it  proves  that  Leonardo,  when 
he  chose,  could  withdraw  himself  from  the 
delight  of  hand-to-mouth  experience  into  a 
vision  of  his  own,  that  he  had  the  reserve  and 
the  creative  power  of  the  earlier  masters  and  of 
that  austere,  laborious  youth  who  taunted  him. 
If  it  were  not  for  "  The  Last  Supper  "  we  might 
doubt  whether  he  could  go  further  in  art  than 
the  vivid  sketch  of  "  The  Magi " ;  but  "  The 
Last  Supper  "  tells  us  how  great  his  passion  for 
reality  must  have  been,  since  it  could  distract 
him  from  the  making  of  such  masterpieces. 

That  passion  for  reality  itself  made  him  cold 
to  other  passions.  We  know  Michelangelo 
and  Beethoven  as  men  in  some  respects  very 
like  other  men.  They  were  anxious,  fretful, 
full  of  affections  and  grievances,  and  much 
concerned  with  their  relations.  Leonardo  is 
like  Melchizedek,  not  only  by  the  accident  of 
birth,  for  he  was  a  natural  son,  but  by  choice. 
He  never  married,  he  never  had  a  home ;  there 
is  no  evidence  that  he  was  ever  tied  to  any 
man  or  woman  by  his  affections ;  yet  it  would 
be  stupid  to  call  him  cold,  for  his  one  grand 
passion  absorbed  him.  Monks  suspected  him, 
but  in  his  heart  he  was  celibate  like  the  great 
monkish  saints,  celibate  not  by  vows  but  by 
22 


Leonardo  da  Vinci 

preoccupation.  It  is  clear  that  from  youth  to 
age  life  had  no  cumulative  power  over  him ; 
as  we  should  say  in  our  prosaic  language,  he 
never  settled  down,  for  he  let  things  happen  to 
him  and  valued  the  very  happening.  He  was 
always  like  a  strange,  wonderful  creature  from 
another  planet,  taking  notes  with  unstaled 
delight  but  never  losing  his  heart  to  any 
particular.  Sex  itself  seems  hardly  to  exist  for 
him,  or  at  least  for  his  mind.  Often  the  people 
in  his  drawings  are  of  no  sex.  Rembrandt 
draws  every  one,  Leonardo  no  one,  as  if  he  were 
his  own  relation.  Women  and  youths  were  as 
much  a  subject  of  his  impassioned  curiosity 
as  flowers,  and  no  more.  He  is  always  the 
spectator,  but  a  spectator  who  can  exercise 
every  faculty  of  the  human  mind  and  every 
passion  in  contemplation ;  he  is  the  nearest 
that  any  man  has  ever  come  to  Aristotle's 
Supreme  Being. 

But  we  must  not  suppose  that  he  went 
solemnly  through  life  living  up  to  his  own 
story,  that  he  was  mysterious  in  manner  or  in 
any  respect  like  a  charlatan.  Rather,  he  lived 
always  in  the  moment  and  overcame  mankind 
by  his  spontaneity.  He  had  the  charm  of  the 
real  man  of  genius,  not  the  reserve  of  the  false 
one.     The  famous  statement  of  what  he  could 

23 


Essays  on  Art 

do,  which  he  made  to  Ludovico  Sforza,  is  not  a 
mere  boast  but  an  expression  of  his  eagerness 
to  do  it.  These  engines  of  war  were  splendid 
toys  to  him,  and  all  his  life  he  enjoyed  making 
toys  and  seeing  men  wonder  at  them.  His 
delight  was  to  do  things  for  the  first  time  like 
a  child,  and  then  not  to  do  them  again. 
Again  and  again  he  cries  out  against  authority 
and  in  favour  of  discovery.  "  Whoever  in  dis- 
cussion adduces  authority,"  he  says,  "  uses  not 
intellect  but  rather  memory  " ;  and,  anticipat- 
ing Milton,  he  observes  that  all  our  knowledge 
originates  in  opinions.  Perhaps  some  one  had 
rebuked  him  for  having  too  many  opinions. 
We  can  be  sure  that  he  chafed  against  dull, 
cautious,  safe  men  who  wished  for  results.  He 
himself  cared  nothing  for  them  ;  it  was  enough 
for  him  to  know  what  might  be  done,  without 
doing  it.  He  was  so  sure  of  his  insight  that 
he  did  not  care  to  put  it  to  the  test  of  action  ; 
that  was  for  slower  men,  whether  artists  or 
men  of  science.  His  notebooks  were  enough 
for  him. 

In  spite  of  the  notebooks  and  the  sketches, 
we  know  less  about  the  man  Leonardo  than 
about  the  man  Shakespeare.  Here  and  there 
he  makes  a  remark  with  some  personal  con- 
viction or  experience  in  it.  "  Intellectual 
24 


Leonardo  da  Vinci 

passion,"  he  says,  "  drives  out  sensuality."  In 
him  it  had  driven  out  or  sublimated  all  the 
sensual  part  of  character.  We  cannot  touch 
or  see  or  hear  him  in  anything  he  says  or 
draws.  The  passion  is  there,  but  it  is  too 
much  concerned  with  universals  to  be  of  like 
nature  with  our  own  passions.  He  seems  to 
be  speaking  to  himself  as  if  he  had  forgotten 
the  whole  audience  of  mankind,  but  in  what 
he  says  he  ignores  the  personal  part  of  himself ; 
he  is  most  passionate  when  most  impersonal. 
"  To  the  ambitious,  whom  neither  the  boon  of 
life  nor  the  beauty  of  the  world  suffices  to 
content,  it  comes  as  a  penance  that  life  with 
them  is  squandered  and  that  they  possess 
neither  the  benefits  nor  the  beauty  of  the 
world."  That  might  be  a  platitude  said  by 
some  one  else ;  but  we  know  that  in  it  Leonardo 
expresses  his  faith.  The  boon  of  life,  the 
beauty  of  the  world,  were  enough  for  him 
without  ambition,  without  even  further  affec- 
tions. He  left  father  and  mother  and  wealth, 
and  even  achievement,  to  follow  them ;  and  he 
left  all  those  not  out  of  coldness,  or  fear,  or 
idleness,  but  because  his  own  passion  drew  him 
away.  No  cold  man  could  have  said,  "  Where 
there  is  most  power  of  feeling,  there  of  martyrs 
is    the   greatest    martyr."     It   is    difficult   for 

25 


Essays  on  Art 

us  northerners  to  understand  the  intellectual 
passion  of  the  South,  to  see  even  that  it  is 
passion  ;  most  difficult  of  all  for  us  to  see  that 
in  men  like  Leonardo  the  passion  for  beauty 
itself  is  intellectual.  We,  with  our  romanti- 
cism, our  sense  of  exile,  can  never  find  that 
identity  which  he  found  between  beauty  and 
reality.  "  This  benign  nature  so  provides  that 
all  over  the  world  you  find  something  to 
imitate."  To  us  imitation  means  prose,  to 
him  it  meant  poetry;  science  itself  meant 
poetry,  and  illusion  was  the  only  ugliness. 
"  Nature  never  breaks  her  own  law."  It 
is  we  who  try  to  find  freedom  in  lawlessness, 
which  is  ignorance,  ugliness,  illusion.  "  False- 
hood is  so  utterly  vile  that,  though  it  should 
praise  the  great  works  of  God,  it  offends 
against  His  divinity."  There  is  Leonardo's 
religion ;  and  if  still  it  is  too  cold  for  us,  it  is 
because  we  have  not  his  pure  spiritual  fire  in 
ourselves. 


26 


The  Pompadour  in  Art  o       o       ^ 

IT  is  an  important  fact  in  the  history  of  the 
arts  for  the  last  century  or  more  that  in 
England  and  America,  if  not  elsewhere,  the 
chief  interest  in  all  the  arts,  including  litera- 
ture, has  been  taken  by  women  rather  than 
by  men.  In  the  great  ages  of  art  it  was  not 
so.  Women,  so  far  as  we  can  tell,  had  little 
to  do  with  the  art  of  Greece  in  the  fifth  century 
or  with  the  art  of  the  Middle  Ages.  There 
were  female  patrons  of  art  at  the  Renaissance, 
but  they  were  exceptions  subject  to  the  pre- 
vailing masculine  taste.  Art  was  and  remained 
a  proper  interest  of  men  up  to  the  eighteenth 
century.  Women  first  began  to  control  it  and 
to  affect  its  character  at  the  mistress-ridden 
Court  of  Louis  XV.  But  in  the  nineteenth 
century  men  began  to  think  they  were  too  busy 
to  concern  themselves  with  the  arts.  Men  of 
power,  when  they  were  not  working,  needed 
to  take  exercise  and  left  it  to  their  wives  to 
patronize  the  arts.  And  so  the  notion  grew 
37 


Essays  on  Art 

thft  art  was  a  feminine  concern,  and  even 
artists  were  pets  for  women.  The  great  man, 
especially  in  America,  liked  his  wife  to  have 
every  luxury.  The  exquisite  life  she  led  was 
itself  a  proof  of  his  success ;  and  she  was  for 
him  a  living  work  of  art,  able  to  live  so  because 
of  the  abundance  of  his  strength.  In  her,  that 
strength  passed  into  ornament  and  became 
beautiful ;  she  was  a  friendly,  faithful  Delilah 
to  his  Samson,  a  Delilah  who  did  not  shear  his 
locks.  And  so  he  came  to  think  of  art  itself 
as  being  in  its  nature  feminine  if  not  effeminate, 
as  a  luxury  and  ornament  of  life,  as  everything, 
in  fact,  except  a  means  of  expression  for  him- 
self and  other  men. 

This  female  control  of  art  began,  as  I  have 
said,  at  the  mistress-ridden  Court  of  Louis  XV, 
and  it  has  unfortunately  kept  the  stamp  of  its 
origin.  At  that  Court  art,  to  suit  the  tastes 
of  the  Pompadour  and  the  Du  Barri,  became 
consciously  frivolous,  became  almost  a  part  of 
the  toilet.  The  artist  was  the  slave  of  the 
mistress,  and  seems  to  have  enjoyed  his  chains. 
In  this  slavery  he  did  produce  something 
charming;  he  did  invest  that  narrow  and 
artificial  Heaven  of  the  Court  with  some  of  the 
infinite  beauty  and  music  of  a  real  Heaven. 
But  out  of  this  refined  harem  art  there  has 
28 


The  Pompadour  in  Art 

sprung  a  harem  art  of  the  whole  world  which 
has  infested  the  homes  even  of  perfectly  respect- 
able ladies  ever  since.  All  over  Europe  the 
ideals  of  applied  art  have  remained  the  ideals 
of  the  Pompadour ;  and  only  by  a  stern  and  con- 
scious effort  have  either  women  or  men  been  able 
to  escape  from  them.  Everywhere  there  has 
spread  a  strange  disease  of  romantic  snobbery, 
the  sufferers  from  which,  in  their  efforts  at 
aesthetic  expression,  always  pretend  to  be  what 
they  are  not.  Excellent  mothers  of  families, 
in  their  furniture  and  sometimes  even  in  their 
clothes,  pretend  to  be  King's  mistresses.  Of 
course,  if  this  pretence  were  put  into  words  and 
so  presented  to  their  consciousness,  they  would 
be  indignant.  It  has  for  them  no  connexion  with 
conduct ;  it  is  purely  aesthetic,  but  art  means  to 
them  make-believe,  the  make-believe  that  they 
live  an  entirely  frivolous  life  of  pleasure  provided 
for  them  by  masculine  power  and  devotion. 

Yet  these  ladies  know  that  they  have  not  the 
revenues  of  the  Pompadour;  they  must  have 
their  art,  their  make-believe,  as  cheap  as 
possible ;  and  it  has  been  one  of  the  triumphs 
of  modern  industry  to  provide  them  with  cheap 
imitations  of  the  luxury  of  the  Pompadour. 
Hence  the  machine-made  frivolities  of  the  most 
respectable  homes,  the  hair-brushes  with  backs 
29 


Essays  on  Art 

of  stamped  silver,  the  scent-bottles  of  imitation 
cut-glass,  the  draperies  with  printed  rose-buds 
on  them,  the  general  artificial-floweriness  and 
flimsiness  and  superfluity  of  naughtiness  of  our 
domestic  art.  It  expresses  a  feminine  romance 
to  which  the  male  indulgently  consents,  as  if 
he  were  really  the  voluptuous  monarch  whose 
mistress  the  female,  aesthetically,  pretends  to 
be.  In  this  world  of  aesthetic  make-believe 
our  homes  are  not  respectable ;  they  would 
scorn  to  be  so,  for  to  the  romantic  female  mind, 
when  it  occupies  itself  with  art,  the  improper 
is  the  artistic. 

But  this  needs  a  more  precise  demonstration. 
We  wonder  at  our  modern  passion  for  super- 
fluous ornament.  We  shall  understand  it  only 
if  we  discover  its  origin.  The  King's  mistress 
liked  everything  about  her  to  be  ornamented, 
because  it  was  a  point  of  honour  with  her  to 
advertise  the  King's  devotion  to  her  in  the 
costliness  of  all  her  surroundings.  He  loved 
her  so  much  that  he  had  paid  for  all  this  orna- 
mentation. She,  like  Cleopatra,  was  always 
proving  the  potency  of  her  charms  by  melting 
pearls  in  vinegar.  Like  a  prize  ox,  she  was 
hung  with  the  trophies  of  her  physical  pre- 
eminence. In  all  the  art  which  we  call  Louis 
Quinze  there  is  this  advertisement  of  the  labour 
30 


The   Pompadour  in  Art 

spent  upon  it.  It  proclaims  that  a  vast  deal 
of  trouble  has  been  taken  in  the  making  of  it, 
and  we  can  see  the  artist  utterly  subdued  to 
this  trouble,  utterly  the  slave  of  the  mistress's 
exorbitant  whims.  This  advertisement  of  labour 
spent,  without  the  reality,  has  been  the  mark 
of  all  popular  domestic  art  ever  since. 

The  beau  tiful  is  the  ornamented — namely,  that 
which  looks  as  if  it  had  taken  a  great  deal  of 
trouble  to  make.  The  trouble  now  is  taken  by 
machinery,  and  so,  with  the  cost,  is  minimized  ; 
and  what  it  produces  is  ugliness,  an  ugliness 
which  could  not  be  mistaken  for  beauty  but  for 
the  notion  that  it  does  express  a  desirable  state 
of  being  in  those  who  possess  it.  And  this 
desirable  state  is  the  state  of  the  King''s  mistress, 
of  a  siren  who  can  have  whatever  she  desires 
because  of  the  potency  of  her  charms.  How 
otherwise  can  we  explain  the  passion  for  super- 
fluous machine-made  ornament  which  makes  our 
respectable  homes  so  hideous.?  The  machine 
simulates  a  trouble  that  has  not  been  taken, 
and  so  gives  proof  of  a  voluptuous  infatuation 
that  does  not  exist.  The  hardworking  mother 
of  a  family  buys  out  of  her  scanty  allowance 
a  scent-bottle  that  looks  as  if  it  had  been 
laboriously  cut  for  a  King's  mistress,  whereas 
really  it   has  been  moulded   by  machinery  to 

31 


Essays  on  Art 

keep  up  the  delusion,  unconsciously  cherished 
by  her,  that  she  lives  in  a  world  of  irresistible 
and  unscrupulous  feminine  charm.  And  her 
husband  endures  indulgently  all  this  super- 
fluous ugliness  because  he,  too,  believes  that 
it  is  the  function  of  art  to  make  the  drawing- 
room  of  the  mother  of  a  family  look  like  the 
boudoir  of  a  siren. 

Most  of  this  make-believe  remains  uncon- 
scious. We  are  all  so  used  to  it  that  we  do 
not  see  in  it  the  expression  of  the  dying  harem 
instinct  in  women.  Yet  it  persists,  even  where 
the  harem  instinct  would  be  passionately 
repudiated.  It  persists  often  in  the  dress  of 
the  most  defiant  suffragette,  in  outbreaks  of 
incongruous  frivolity,  forlorn  tawdry  roses  that 
still  whisper  memories  of  the  Pompadour  and 
her  triumphant  guilty  splendour. 

But  besides  all  this  unconscious  feminine 
influence  upon  art,  there  is  the  influence  of 
women  who  care  consciously  for  art ;  and  it 
also  has  an  enervating  effect  on  the  artist. 
For  the  female  patron  of  art,  just  because 
there  are  so  few  male  patrons  of  it,  is  apt  to 
take  a  motherly  interest  in  the  artist.  To 
her  he  is  a  delightful  wayward  child  rather 
than  a  real  man  occupied  with  real  things,  like 
her  husband  or  her  father  or  her  brother :  not 
32 


The  Pompadour  in  Art 

one  who  can  earn  money  for  her  and  fight  for 
her  and  protect  her,  but  rather  one  who  needs 
to  be  protected  and  humoured  in  a  world  which 
cares  so  little  for  art.  To  her,  with  all  her 
passion  for  art,  it  is  something  in  its  nature 
irrational,  and,  like  a  child,  delightful  because 
irrational.  It  is  an  escape  from  reality  rather 
than  a  part  of  it.  And  so  she  will  believe 
whatever  the  artist  tells  her  because  he  is  an 
artist,  not  because  he  is  a  man  of  sense ;  and 
she  encourages  him  to  be  more  of  an  artist 
than  a  man  of  sense.  She  encourages  him  to 
be  extravagantly  aesthetic,  and  enjoys  all  his 
extravagance  as  a  diversion  from  the  sound 
masculinity  of  her  own  mankind.  There  is 
room  in  her  prosperous,  easy  world  for  these 
diversions  from  business,  just  as  there  is  room 
for  charity  or,  perhaps,  religion.  The  world 
can  afford  artists  as  it  can  aiFord  pets ;  as  it 
can  afford  beautiful,  cultivated  women.  And 
that  also  is  the  view  of  her  husband,  if  he  is 
good-natured.  But  to  him,  just  because  art 
and  artists  are  the  proper  concern  of  his  wife, 
they  are  even  less  serious  than  they  are  to  her. 
She  may  persuade  herself  that  she  takes  them 
quite  seriously,  but  he  pretends  to  do  so  only 
out  of  politeness,  and  as  he  would  pretend  to 
take  her  clothes  seriously.     For  him  the  type 

c  33 


Essays  on  Art 

of  the  artist  is  still  the  pianist  who  gives  locks 
of  his  over-abundant  hair  to  ladies.  Even  if 
the  artist  is  a  painter  and  cuts  his  hair  and 
dresses  like  a  man,  he  still  belongs  to  the 
feminine  world  and  excites  himself  about 
matters  that  do  not  concern  men.  Men  can 
afford  him,  and  so  they  tolerate  him ;  but  he 
is  one  of  the  expenses  they  would  cut  down  if 
it  were  necessary  to  cut  down  expenses. 

Well,  it  is  necessary  to  cut  down  expenses 
now ;  and  yet  in  ages  much  sterner  and  poorer 
than  our  own  art  was  the  concern  of  men,  and 
they  afforded  it  because  it  was  not  to  them 
a  mere  feminine  luxury.  They  afforded  the 
towering  churches  of  the  Middle  Ages  because 
they  expressed  the  religious  passion  of  all  man- 
kind ;  and  have  we  nothing  to  express  except 
a  dying  harem  instinct  and  the  motherliness  of 
kind  women  to  a  neglected  class  ?  We  ought 
to  be  grateful  to  this  motherliness,  which  has 
kept  art  alive  in  an  age  of  ignorance;  but 
we  should  see  that  it  is  only  a  pis-aller,  and 
women  should  see  this  as  well  as  men.  The 
female  attitude  towards  art  has  been  itself 
the  result  of  a  wrong  relation  between  women 
and  men,  a  relation  half-animal,  half-romantic, 
and  therefore  not  quite  real.  This  relation, 
even  while   it   has  ceased   to   exist  more  and 

34 


The  Pompadour  in  Art 

more  in  fact,  has  still  continued  to  express 
itself  aesthetically ;  and  in  art  it  has  become  a 
mere  obsolete  nuisance.  One  may  care  nothing 
for  art  and  yet  long  to  be  rid  of  the  meaning- 
less frivolities  of  oui'  domestic  art.  One  may 
wish  to  clear  them  away  as  so  much  litter  and 
trash;  and  this  clearance  is  necessary  so  that 
we  may  purge  our  vision  and  see  what  is  beauti- 
ful. We  are  almost  rid  of  the  manners  of  the 
King's  mistress,  and  most  women  no  longer  try 
to  appeal  to  men  by  their  charming  unreason. 
It  is  not  merely  that  the  appeal  fails  now  ;  they 
themselves  refuse  to  make  it,  out  of  self-respect. 
But  they  still  remain  irrational  in  their  tastes ; 
or  at  least  they  have  not  learned  that  all  this 
aesthetic  irrationality  misrepresents  them,  that 
it  is  forced  upon  them  by  tradesmen,  that 
it  is  as  inexpressive  as  a  sentimental  music- 
hall  song  sung  by  a  gramophone.  But  now 
that  men  have  given  women  the  vote,  and  so 
proved  that  they  take  them  seriously  at  last, 
they  have  the  right  to  speak  plainly  on  this 
matter.  The  feminine  influence  upon  art  has 
been  bad.  Let  us  admit  that  it  has  been  the 
result  of  a  bad  masculine  influence  upon  women, 
that  it  has  been  supreme  because  men  have 
become  philistine ;  but  the  fact  remains  that 
it  has  been  bad.     Art  must  be  taken  seriously 

35 


Essays  on  Art 

if  it  is  to  be  worth  anything.  It  must  be  the 
expression  of  what  is  serious  and  real  in  the 
human  mind.  But  all  this  feminine  art  has 
expressed,  and  has  tried  to  glorify,  something 
false  and  worthless.  Therefore  it  has  been  ugly, 
and  we  are  all  sick  of  its  ugliness.  We  look  to 
women,  now  that  they  are  equalled  with  men 
by  an  act  of  legal  justice,  to  deliver  us  from 
it  They  disown  the  Pompadour  in  fact ;  let 
them  disown  her  in  art. 


36 


An  Unpopular  Master  -^       <?■       ^£> 

NICHOLAS  POUSSIN  is  one  of  the  great 
paintei-s  of  the  world ;  yet  it  is  easier 
to  give  reasons  for  disliking  him  than  for  liking 
him.  After  his  death  there  was  a  war  of 
pamphlets  about  him ;  the  one  side,  led  by 
Lebrun,  holding  him  up  as  a  model  for  all 
painters  to  come,  the  other  side,  under  de 
Piles,  calling  him  a  mere  pedant  compared  with 
Rubens.  Here  is  a  passage  from  a  poem 
against  Poussin : — 

II  sgavoit  manier  la  regie  et  le  compas, 
Parloit  de  la  lumi^re  et  ne  I'entendoit  pas  ; 
II  estoit  de  I'antique  un  assez  bon  copiste, 
Mais  sans  invention,  et  mauvais  coloriste. 
II  ne  pouvait  marcher  que  sur  le  pas  d'autruy : 
Le  gdnie  a  manqu^,  c'est  un  malheur  pour  luy. 

Now  this  is  just  what  the  criticism  of  yester- 
day said  about  him,  the  criticism  of  the  eighties 
and  nineties,  when  it  was  supposed  that  Velas- 
quez had  discovered  the  art  of  seeing,  and  with 

37 


Essays  on  Art 

it  the  art  of  painting.  It  sounds  plausible, 
but  not  a  word  of  it  is  true.  And  yet  it 
remains  difficult  to  show  why  it  is  not  true,  to 
distinguish  between  the  genius  of  Poussin  and 
the  pedantry  of  his  imitators,  to  convince 
people  that  he  was  not  a  bad  colourist,  and 
that  he  did  not  imitate  the  antique. 

This  difficulty  is  connected  with  the  age  in 
which  he  happened  to  live.  Nobody  calls 
Mantegna  a  pedant  nowadays ;  yet  one  might 
say  against  him  most  of  the  things  that  have 
been  said  against  Poussin.  But  Mantegna 
lived  in  a  century  that  we  like,  and  Poussin  in 
one  that  we  dislike.  The  seventeenth  century 
is  for  us  a  time  of  pictorial  platitude ;  there 
was  nothing  then  to  discover  about  gesture  or 
expression,  and  painters,  even  the  best  of  them, 
used  stock  gestures  and  stock  expressions  with- 
out any  of  the  eagerness  of  discovery.  Now 
Poussin  is,  or  appears  to  be,  in  many  of  his 
works  a  dramatic  painter,  and  for  us  his 
drama  is  platitudinous.  Take  the  "  Plague 
of  Ashdod,"  in  the  National  Gallery.  There 
are  the  gestures  that  we  are  already  a  little 
weary  of  in  Raphael's  cartoons.  The  figures 
express  horror  and  fear  with  uplifted  hands 
or  contorted  features ;  but  their  real  business 
seems  to  be  to  make  the  picture.  The  drama 
38 


An  Unpopular  Master 

is  thrust  upon  us,  and  we  cannot  ignore  it ;  yet 
we  feel  that  it  is  no  discovery  for  the  artist, 
but  something  that  he  has  learnt  like  a  second- 
rate  actor — that  he  has,  in  fact,  a  "bag  of 
tricks  "  in  common  with  all  the  Italian  painters 
of  his  time,  and  that  he  is  only  pretending  to 
be  surprised  by  his  subject.  Now  every  age 
has  its  artistic  platitudes;  but  these  plati- 
tudes of  dramatic  expression  are  peculiarly 
wearisome  to  us  because  they  have  persisted  in 
European  painting  up  to  the  present  day,  and 
because  most  great  painters  in  modern  times 
have  struggled  in  one  way  or  another  to  escape 
from  them.  We  associate  them  with  medio- 
crity and  insincerity ;  and  we  do  not  under- 
stand that  for  many  of  the  better  painters  of 
the  seventeenth  century  they  were  only  a  basis 
for  discoveries  of  a  different  kind.  II  Greco, 
for  instance,  is  often  as  dramatically  platitudin- 
ous as  Guido  Reni,  but  he  also  was  making 
discoveries  in  design  which  happen  to  interest 
us  now,  so  that  we  overlook  his  platitudes. 
He  was  trying  to  express  his  emotions  not  so 
much  by  gesture  and  the  play  of  features  as  by 
a  rhythm  really  independent  of  those,  a  rhythm 
carried  through  everything  in  the  picture,  to 
which  all  his  platitudes  are  subject.  And 
because   this  rhythm   is   new   to   us   now    we 

39 


Essays  on  Art 

hardly  notice  the  platitudes.  Poussin  was 
playing  the  same  game,  but  his  rhythm  has 
been  imitated  by  so  many  dull  painters  that 
we  are  tempted  to  think  it  as  platitudinous 
as  his  drama,  and  that  is  where  we  are  unjust 
to  him. 

Poussin  had  a  mind  that  was  at  once  pas- 
sionate and  determined  to  be  master  of  its 
passions.  He  would  not  suppress  them,  but 
he  would  express  them  with  complete  com- 
posure ;  and  as  Donne  in  poetry  tried  to  attain 
to  an  intellectual  mastery  over  his  passions  by 
means  of  conceits,  so  Poussin  in  painting  tried 
to  attain  to  the  same  mastery  through  the 
representation  of  an  ideal  world.  Each  was 
enthralled  with  his  experience  of  real  life ;  but 
each  was  dissatisfied  with  the  haphazard,  tyran- 
nous nature  of  that  experience,  and  especially 
with  the  divorce  between  passion  and  intellect, 
which  in  actual  experience  is  so  painful  to  the 
man  who  is  both  passionate  and  intelligent.  So 
each,  in  his  art,  tried  to  make  a  new  kind  of 
experience,  in  which  passion  should  be  intelli- 
gent and  intellect  passionate.  This,  no  doubt, 
is  what  every  artist  tries  to  do ;  but  the  effort 
was  peculiarly  fierce  in  Donne  and  Poussin 
because  in  them  there  was  a  more  than  common 
discord  between  passion  and  intelligence, 
40 


An  Unpopular  Master 

because  they  were  instantly  critical  both  of 
what  they  desired  and  of  their  own  process  of 
desire.  Donne,  at  the  very  height  of  passion, 
asked  himself  why  he  was  passionate ;  and  he 
could  not  express  his  passion  without  trying  to 
justify  it  to  his  intelligence.  So  in  his  poetry 
he  endeavoiu-ed  to  experience  it  again  with 
simultaneous  intellectual  justification  which  in 
that  poetry  was  a  part  of  the  experience  itself. 
Poussin  aims  not  so  much  at  an  intellectual 
justification  of  passion  as  at  an  expression  of  it 
in  which  there  shall  be  also  complete  intellec- 
tual composure.  He  aims  in  his  art  at  an 
experience  in  which  the  intellect  shall  be  free 
from  the  bewilderment  of  the  passions  and  the 
passions  also  free  from  the  check  of  the 
intellect ;  and  to  this  he  attains  by  the  repre- 
sentation of  an  ideal  state  in  which  the  intel- 
lect can  make  all  the  forms  through  which  the 
passion  expresses  itself.  He  is,  in  fact,  nearer 
than  most  painters  to  the  musician ;  but  still 
he  is  a  painter  and  appeals  to  us  through  the 
representation  of  objects  that  we  can  recognize 
by  their  likeness  to  what  we  have  seen  our- 
selves. His  intellect  desires  to  make  its  forms, 
not  to  have  them  imposed  upon  it  by  mere 
ocular  experience,  since  ocular  experience  for 
him  is  full  of  the  tyrannous  bewilderment  of 
41 


Essays  on  Art 

actual  passion.  But  at  the  same  time  those 
forms  which  his  intellect  makes  must  be  recog- 
nized  by  their  likeness  to  what  men  see  in  the 
world  about  them.  So  he  found  a  link 
between  his  ideal  forms  and  what  men  see  in 
what  is  vaguely  called  the  antique. 

But  he  did  not  go  to  the  antique  out  of  any 
artistic  snobbery  or  because  he  distrusted  his 
own  natm-al  taste.  The  antique  was  not  for 
him  an  aristocratic  world  of  art  that  he  tried 
to  enter  in  the  hope  of  becoming  himself  an 
aristocrat.  He  showed  that  he  was  perfectly 
at  ease  in  that  world  by  the  manner  in  which  he 
painted  its  subjects.  When,  for  instance,  he 
paints  Bacchanals,  he  is  really  much  less  over- 
awed by  the  subject  than  Rubens  would  be. 
Rubens,  who  was  a  man  of  culture  and  an 
intellectual  parvenu,  tried  desperately  to  com- 
bine his  natural  tastes  Avith  classical  subjects. 
When  he  painted  a  Flemish  cook  as  Venus  he 
really  tried  to  make  her  look  like  Venus ;  and 
the  result  is  a  Flemish  cook  pretending  to  be 
Venus,  an  incongruity  that  betrays  a  like  incon- 
gruity in  the  artistes  mind.  Poussin''s  Venus, 
far  less  flesh  and  blood,  does  belong  entirely  to 
the  world  in  which  he  imagines  her — indeed, 
so  intensely  that,  if  we  have  lost  interest  in 
that  world,  she  fails  to  interest  us.  The  Vene- 
42 


An  Unpopular  Master 

tians  have  done  this  much  better,  we  think ; 
and  why,  if  Poussin  was  going  to  paint  like 
Titian,  did  he  not  use  Titian's  colour?  The 
answer  is,  Because  his  mood  was  very  far  from 
Titian's,  because  he  makes  a  comment  that 
Titian  never  makes  upon  his  Venuses  and 
Bacchanals.  Rubens  makes  no  comment  at  all : 
his  attitude  towards  the  classical  is  that  of 
the  wondering  parvenu.  Titian  through  the 
classical  expresses  the  Renaissance  liberation 
from  scruple  and  fear.  But  Poussin  gives  us  a 
mortal  comment  upon  this  immortal  careless- 
ness and  delight.  Whether  his  figures  are 
tranquil  or  rapturous,  there  is  in  his  colour  an 
expression  of  something  far  from  their  felicity. 
Indeed,  however  voluptuous  the  forms  may  be, 
the  colour  is  always  ascetic.  It  is  not  that  he 
seems  to  disapprove  of  those  glorified  pleasures 
of  the  senses,  but  that  he  cannot  satisfy  him- 
self with  his  own  conception  of  them,  as  Titian 
could.  Titian  represents  a  world  in  which  all 
the  mind  consents  to  delight.  His  figures 
are  not  foolish,  but  they  are  like  dancers  or 
dreamers  to  the  music  of  their  own  pleasure. 
He  makes  us  hear  that  music  to  which  his 
figures  dance  or  dream ;  but,  with  Poussin,  we 
do  not  hear  it,  we  only  see  the  figures  subject 
to   it  as  to    some   influence    from    whieh   we 

43 


Essays  on  Art 

are  cut  off ;  and  that  which  cuts  us  off  is  the 
colour. 

Most  painters,  if  they  wished  to  paint  a  scene 
of  voluptuous  pleasure,  would  conceive  it  first 
in  colour ;  for  colour  is  the  natural  expression 
of  all  delights  of  the  senses.  But  Poussin 
never  allows  the  delight  that  he  paints  to 
aiFect  his  colour  at  all.  That  is  always  an 
expression  of  his  own  permanent  mind,  of  a 
mind  that  could  not  dance  or  dream  to  the 
music  of  any  pleasure  possible  in  this  world. 
For  him  the  ideal  world  was  not  merely  one 
of  perpetual,  intensified  pleasure,  but  one  in 
which  all  the  activities  of  the  mind  should 
work  like  gratified  senses  and  yet  keep  their 
own  character,  in  which  passion  should  be  freed 
from  its  bewilderment  and  intellect  from  its 
questioning.  That  was  what  he  tried  to 
represent ;  and  his  colour  was  a  comment, 
half-unconscious  perhaps,  upon  its  impossi- 
bility. For  the  everlasting  conflict  between 
colour  and  form  does  itself  express  that 
impossibility.  Whatever  he  might  represent, 
Poussin  could  not,  for  one  moment,  lose  his 
interest  in  form  or  subordinate  it  to  colour. 
His  figures,  whatever  their  raptures,  must 
express  his  own  intellectual  mastery  of  them  ; 
and  it  was  impossible  to  combine  this  with  a 

44 


An  Unpopular  Master 

colour  that  should  express  their  raptures.  But 
Poussin,  knowing  this  impossibility,  was  not 
content  with  a  compromise.  He  might  have 
used  a  faintly  agreeable  colour  that  would  not 
be  incongruous  with  their  raptures ;  but  he 
chose  rather  to  express  his  own  exasperation 
in  a  colour  that  was  violently  incongruous  with 
them,  but  which  at  the  same  time  heightens 
his  emphasis  upon  form.  So,  though  there  is 
an  incongruity  between  the  subject  itself  and 
the  mood  in  which  it  is  treated,  there  is  none 
in  the  treatment.  Poussin  himself  seems  to 
look,  and  to  make  us  look,  at  a  mythological 
Paradise,  with  the  searching,  mournful  gaze  of 
a  human  spectator.  This  glory  is  forbidden  to 
us  not  merely  by  our  circumstances  but  by  the 
nature  of  our  own  minds.  It  is,  indeed,  one  of 
our  own  conceptions  of  Heaven,  but  inadequate 
like  all  the  rest ;  and  Poussin,  by  making  the 
conception  clear  to  us,  reveals  its  inadequacy. 

He  paints  the  subjects  of  the  Renaissance 
like  a  man  remembering  his  own  youth,  and 
sad,  not  because  he  has  lost  the  pleasures  of 
youth,  but  because  he  wasted  himself  upon 
them.  Here  are  these  deities,  he  seems  to  tell 
us,  but  there  must  be  a  secret  in  their  felicity 
that  we  do  not  understand.  The  joy  they 
seem  to  offer  is  below  us,  and  he  will  not  pre- 

45 


Essays  on  Art 

tend  to  have  caught  it  from  them  in  his  art. 
For  that  art  is  always  sad,  not  with  a  particu- 
lar grief  nor  with  mere  low  spirits,  but  with 
the  incongruity  of  the  passions  and  the  intel- 
lect ;  and  this  noble  sadness  is  expressed  by 
Poussin  as  no  other  painter  has  expressed  it. 
He  was  himself  a  melancholy  man  to  whom  art 
was  the  one  happiness  of  life ;  but  he  did  not 
use  his  art  to  talk  of  his  sorrows.  He  used  it 
to  create  a  world  of  clear  and  orderly  design, 
and  satisfied  his  intellect  in  the  creation  of  it. 
In  his  art  he  could  exercise  the  composure 
which  actual  experience  disturbed ;  he  could 
remake  that  reality  so  troubled  by  the  conflict 
of  sense,  emotion,  and  understanding ;  but, 
even  in  remaking  it,  he  added  the  commeMt 
that  it  was  only  his  in  art.  And  that  is  the 
reason  why  his  art  seems  so  impersonal  to  us, 
why  there  is  the  same  cold  passion  in  all  his 
pictures,  whether  religious  or  mythological. 
In  all  of  them  he  expresses  a  sharp  dissatisfac- 
tion with  the  very  nature  of  his  actual  experi- 
ence. A  painter  like  Rubens  is  entranced 
with  his  own  actual  vision  of  things;  but 
Poussin  tells  us  that  he  has  never  even  seen 
anything  as  he  wanted  to  see  it.  He  is 
not  a  vague  idealist  dissatisfied  with  reality 
because  of  the  weakness  of  his  own  senses  or 
46 


An  Unpopular  Master 

understanding.  Rather  he  seems  to  cry,  like 
Poe,  of  everything  that  he  draws — 

O  God,  can  I  not  grasp 
Them  with  a  tighter  clasp  ? 

It  is  the  very  substance  and  matter  of  things 
that  he  tries  to  master ;  and  that  so  intensely 
that  he  never  sees  them  flushed  or  dimmed  by 
any  mood  of  his  own.  Nor  does  he  allow  the 
passions  of  his  figures  to  aff'ect  his  representa- 
tion of  them  or  of  their  surroundings.  He  is 
cold,  himself,  towards  these  passions,  for  to 
him  they  are  only  a  part  of  the  bewilderment 
of  actual  experience.  But  in  making  forms  he 
escapes  from  that  bewilderment  and  shows  us 
matter  utterly  subject  to  mind.  Yet  in  this 
triumph  there  is  always  implied  the  sadness 
that  such  a  triumph  is  impossible  in  life,  that 
the  artist  cannot  be  what  he  paints.  The 
Renaissance  had  failed,  and  Poussin's  art  was  a 
bitterly  sincere  announcement  of  its  failure. 


47 


A  Defence  of  Criticism         o       ^s>       o 

THE  only  kind  of  critic  taken  seriously  in 
England  is  the  art  critic ;  and  he  is 
taken  seriously  as  an  experi;,  that  is  to  say,  as 
one  who  will  tell  us  not  what  he  has  found  in 
a  work  of  art,  but  who  produced  it.  His  very 
judgment  is  valued  not  on  a  matter  of  art  at 
all,  but  on  a  matter  of  business.  No  one 
wants  to  know  whether  a  ceria,in  picture  is 
good  or  bad.  The  question  is.  Was  it  painted 
by  Romney?  It  might  well  have  been  and 
yet  be  a  very  bad  pictm^ ;  but  that  is  not  the 
point.  Experts  are  called  to  say  that  it  is  by 
Romney  ;  and  they  are  proved  to  be  wrong. 
Thereupon  Sir  Thomas  Jackson  writes  to  the 
Times  and  says  that  if  people  learned  to  think 
for  themselves  the  profession  of  art  critic 
would  be  at  an  end.  The  art  critic,  for  him, 
is  one  who  tells  people  what  to  think.  And 
then  he  proceeds — 

It  is  only  for  the  public  he  writes ;  he  is  of 
no  use  to  artists.  I  doubt  whether  any  man  in 
any  branch  of  art  could  be  found  who  would 

48 


A  Defence  of  Criticism 

honestly  say  he  had  ever  learned  anything 
from  the  art  critic,  who,  after  all,  is  only  an 
amateur.  The  criticism  we  value,  and  that 
which  really  helps,  is  that  of  our  brother 
artists,  often  sharp  and  unsparing,  but  always 
salutary  and  useful.  And  if  useless  to  the 
artist,  art  criticism  is  harmful  to  the  public, 
who  take  their  opinion  from  it  at  second  hand. 
Were  all  art  criticism  made  penal  for  ten  years 
lovers  of  art  would  learn  to  think  for  them- 
selves, and  a  truer  appreciation  of  art  than  the 
commercial  one  would  result,  with  the  greatest 
benefit  both  to  art  and  to  artists.  It  is  the 
artist  and  not  the  professional  critic  who 
should  be  the  real  instructor  of  the  public 
taste. 

Here  there  seems  to  be  an  inconsistency ;  for 
if  we  are  to  think  for  ourselves  we  do  not  need 
to  be  instructed  by  artists  any  more  than  by 
critics.  But  Sir  Thomas  Jackson  may  mean 
that  the  artist  is  to  instruct  the  public  only 
through  his  works.  Still,  the  question  remains, 
How  is  the  artist  to  be  recognized  ?  There  is 
a  riddle — When  is  an  artist  not  an  artist  ?  and 
the  answer  is — Nine  times  out  of  ten.  Cer- 
tainly the  opinions  of  artists  about  each  other 
will  not  bring  security  to  the  public  mind  ; 
and  does  Sir  T.  Jackson  really  believe  that 
artists  always  value  the  criticism  of  brother 
artists.''      Does    an    Academician    value    the 

D  49 


Essays  on  Art 

criticism  of  a  Vorticist,  or  vice  versa?  The 
Academician,  of  course,  would  say  that  the 
Vorticist  was  not  an  artist — and  vice  versa. 
The  artist  values  the  opinion  of  the  artist  who 
agrees  with  him  ;  and  at  present  there  is  less 
agreement  among  artists  than  among  critics. 
They  condemn  each  other  more  than  the 
critics  condemn  them. 

But  these  are  minor  points.  What  I  am 
concerned  with  is  Sir  T.  Jackson's  notion  of 
the  function  of  criticism.  For  him,  as  for 
most  Englishmen,  the  critic  is  one  who  tells 
people  what  to  think ;  and  the  value  of  his 
criticism  depends  upon  his  reputation ;  we 
should  pay  no  heed  to  art  critics,  because  they 
are  not  artists.  But  the  critic,  whether  of  art 
or  of  anything  else,  is  a  writer ;  and  he  is  to 
be  judged  not  by  his  reputation  either  as  artist 
or  as  critic,  but  by  what  he  writes.  Sir  T. 
Jackson  thinks  that  he  is  condemning  the 
critic  when  he  says  that  he  writes  only  for  the 
public.  He  might  as  well  think  that  he  con- 
demned the  artist  if  he  said  that  he  worked 
only  for  the  public.  Of  course  the  critic 
writes  for  the  public,  as  the  painter  paints  for 
the  public ;  and  he  writes  as  one  of  the  public, 
not  as  an  artist.  Further,  if  he  is  a  critic,  he 
does  not  write  to  tell  the  public  what  to  think 
50 


A   Defence  of  Criticism 

any  more  than  he  writes  to  tell  the  painter 
how  to  paint.  Just  as  the  painter  in  his 
pictures  expresses  a  general  interest  in  the 
visible  world,  so  the  critic  in  his  criticism  ex- 
presses a  general  interest  in  art ;  and  his 
justification,  like  that  of  the  painter,  consists 
in  his  power  of  expressing  this  interest.  If  he 
cannot  express  it  well,  it  is  useless  to  talk 
about  his  reputation  either  as  artist  or  critic ; 
one  might  as  well  excuse  a  bad  picture  of  a 
garden  by  saying  that  the  painter  of  it  was  a 
good  gardener  and  therefore  a  good  judge  of 
gardens. 

It  is  a  misfortune  that  the  word  critic  should 
be  derived  from  a  Greek  word  meaning  judge. 
A  critic  certainly  does  arrive  at  judgments ; 
but  the  value  of  his  criticism,  if  it  has  any, 
consists  not  in  the  judgment,  but  in  the 
process  by  which  it  is  arrived  at.  This  fact  is 
seldom  understood  in  England,  either  by  the 
public  or  by  artists.  The  artist  cares  only 
about  the  judgment  and  complains  that  a 
mere  amateur  has  no  right  to  judge  him.  He 
would  rather  be  judged  by  himself;  and,  being 
himself  an  artist,  he  must  be  a  better  judge. 
But  the  question  to  be  asked  about  the  critic 
is  not  whether  he  is  an  amateur  as  an  artist, 
but   whether   he  is   an   amateur  as  a  critic; 

SI 


Essays  on  Art 

and  that  can  be  decided  only  by  his  criticism. 
The  greatest  artist  might  prove  that  he  was 
an  amateur  in  criticism ;  and  he  could  not  dis- 
prove it  by  appealing  to  his  art.  Sir  Joshua 
Reynolds,  for  instance,  thinks  like  an  amateur 
in  some  of  his  discourses ;  and  it  is  amateur 
thinking  to  defend  him  by  saying  that  he  does 
not  paint  like  one. 

Certainly  much  of  our  criticism  consists  of 
mere  judgments,  and  is  therefore  worthless  as 
criticism.  But  much  of  our  art  consists  also 
of  mere  judgments  ;  it  tells  us  nothing  except 
that  the  artist  admires  this  or  that,  or  believes 
that  the  public  admires  it;  and  it  also  is 
worthless  as  art.  But  no  critic  therefore 
writes  to  the  papers  to  say  that,  if  only  the 
public  would  learn  to  feel  for  themselves,  the 
profession  of  artist  would  be  at  an  end.  We 
know  that  the  business  of  an  artist  is  not  to 
teir  the  public  what  to  feel  about  the  visible 
world,  or  anything  else,  but  to  express  his 
own  interest  in  the  visible  world  or  whatever 
may  be  the  subject-matter  of  his  art.  We 
do  not  condemn  art  because  of  its  failures. 
Those  who  know  anything  at  all  about  the 
nature  of  art  know  that  it  has  value  because  it 
expresses  the  common  interests  of  mankind 
better  than  most  men  can  express  them  ;  and 
52 


A  Defence  of  Criticism 

for  this  reason  it  has  value  for  mankind  and 

not  merely  for  artists.  For  this  reason,  also, 
criticism  has  value  for  mankind  and  not  merely 
for  artists  or  for  critics.  But  the  value  of  it 
does  not  lie  in  the  judgment  of  the  critic  any 
more  than  the  value  of  art  lies  in  the  judg- 
ment, taste,  preference  of  the  artist.  The 
value  in  both  cases  lies  in  power  of  expression  ; 
and  by  that  art  and  criticism  are  to  be 
judged. 

Needless  to  say,  then,  criticism  is  not  to  be 
judged  by  the  help  it  gives  to  artists.  One 
might  as  well  suppose  that  philosophy  was  to 
be  judged  by  the  help  it  gives  to  the  Deity. 
The  philosopher  does  not  tell  the  Deity  how 
He  ought  to  have  made  the  universe ;  nor  do 
we  read  philosophy  for  the  sake  of  the  judg- 
ments at  which  philosophers  arrive.  We  do 
not  want  to  know  Kanfs  opinion  because  he 
is  Kant;  what  interests  us  is  the  process  by 
which  he  arrives  at  that  opinion,  and  it  is  the 
process  which  convinces  us  that  his  opinion  is 
right,  if  we  are  convinced.  So  it  is,  or  should 
be,  with  criticism.  It  ought  to  provoke  thought 
rather  than  to  suppress  it ;  and  if  it  does  not 
provoke  thought  it  is  worthless. 

But  in  the  best  criticism  judgment  is  rather 
implied    than    expressed.       For    the     proper 

53 


Essays  on  Art 

subject-matter  of  criticism  is  the  experience  of 
works  of  art.  The  best  critic  is  he  who  has 
experienced  a  work  of  art  so  intensely  that  his 
criticism  is  the  spontaneous  expression  of  his 
experience.  He  tells  us  what  has  happened  to 
him,  as  the  artist  tells  us  what  has  happened 
to  him ;  and  we,  as  we  read,  do  not  judge 
either  the  criticism  or  the  art  criticized,  but 
share  the  experience.  The  value  of  art  lies  in 
the  fact  that  it  communicates  the  experience 
and  the  experiencing  power  of  one  man  to 
many.  When  we  hear  a  symphony  of 
Beethoven,  we  are  for  the  moment  Beethoven ; 
and  we  ourselves  are  enriched  for  ever  by  the 
fact  that  we  have  for  the  moment  been 
Beethoven.  So  the  value  of  the  best  criticism 
lies  in  the  fact  that  it  communicates  the  ex- 
perience and  the  experiencing  power  of  the 
critic  to  his  readers  and  so  enriches  their 
experiencing  power.  If  he  is  futile,  so  is  the 
artist.  If  we  cannot  read  him  without  danger 
to  our  own  independence  of  thought,  neither 
can  we  look  at  a  picture  without  danger  to  our 
own  independence  of  vision.  But  believe  in 
the  fellowship  of  mankind,  believe  that  one 
mind  can  pour  into  another  and  enrich  it  with 
its  own  treasures,  and  you  will  know  that 
neither  art  nor  criticism  is  futile.     They  stand 

54 


A   Defence  of  Criticism 

or  fall  together,  and  the  artist  who  condemns 
the  critic  condemns  himself  also. 

There  remains  the  contention,  half  implied 
by  Sir  T.  Jackson,  that  the  critic's  experience  of 
art  is  of  no  value  because  he  is  not  an  artist. 
Now  if  it  is  of  no  value  to  himself  because  he 
is  not  an  artist,  then  art  is  of  no  value  to 
anyone  except  the  artist,  and  the  artist  who 
practises  the  same  kind  of  art ;  music  is  of 
value  only  to  musicians,  and  painting  to 
painters.  It  cannot  be  that  mere  technical 
training  gives  a  man  the  mysterious  power  of 
experiencing  works  of  art ;  for,  as  we  all  know, 
it  does  not  make  an  artist.  No  artist  will 
admit  that  anyone  through  technical  training 
can  become  a  member  of  the  sacred  brother- 
hood of  those  who  understand  the  mystery  of 
art.  Therefore  they  had  all  better  admit  that 
there  is  no  mystery  about  it,  or,  rather,  a 
mystery  for  us  all.  Either  art  is  of  value  to 
us  all,  and  our  own  experience  of  it  is  of  value 
to  us ;  or  art  has  no  value  whatever  to  anyone, 
but  is  the  meaningless  activity  of  a  few  oddities 
who  would  be  better  employed  in  agriculture. 

But  if  our  own  experience  of  art  is  of  value 
to  us,  then  it  is  possible  for  us  to  communicate 
that  experience  to  others  so  that  it  may  be  of 
value  to  them  ;  as  it  is  possible  for  the  painter 

55 


Essays  on  Art 

to  communicate  to  others  his  experience  of  the 
visible  world.  If  he  denies  this,  once  again  he 
denies  himself.  He  shuts  himself  within  the 
prison  of  his  own  aiTOgance,  from  which  he 
can  escape  only  by  a  want  of  logic.  But, 
further,  if  our  experience  of  art  is  of  value  to 
ourselves,  and  if  it  is  possible  for  us  to  com- 
municate that  experience  to  others,  it  is  also 
possible  for  us  to  arrive  at  conclusions  about 
that  experience  which  may  be  of  value  both  to 
ourselves  and  to  others.  Hence  scientific  or 
philosophic  criticism,  which  is  based  not,  as 
some  artists  seem  to  think,  upon  a  fraudulent 
pretence  of  the  critic  that  he  himself  is  an 
artist,  but  upon  that  experience  of  art  which 
is,  or  may  be,  common  to  all  men.  The  philo- 
sophic critic  writes  not  as  one  who  knows  how 
to  produce  that  which  he  criticizes  better  than 
he  who  has  produced  it,  but  as  one  who  has 
experienced  art;  and  his  own  experience  is 
really  the  subject-matter  of  his  criticism.  If 
he  is  a  philosophic  critic,  he  will  know  that  his 
experience  is  itself  necessarily  imperfect.  As 
some  one  has  said  :  "  We  do  not  judge  works 
of  art ;  they  judge  us  *''';  and  the  critic  is  to  be 
judged  by  the  manner  in  which  he  has  experi- 
enced art,  as  the  painter  is  to  be  judged  by  the 
manner  in  which  he  has  experienced  the  visible 
56 


A   Defence  of  Criticism 

world.  All  the  imperfections  of  his  experience 
will  be  betrayed  in  his  criticism  ;  where  he  is 
insensitive,  there  he  will  fail,  both  as  artist 
and  as  philosopher ;  and  of  this  fact  he  must 
be  constantly  aware.  So  if  he  gives  himself 
the  airs  of  a  judge,  if  he  relies  on  his  own 
reputation  to  make  or  mar  the  reputation 
of  a  work  of  art,  he  ceases  to  be  a  critic  and 
deserves  all  that  artists  in  their  haste  have  said 
about  him.  Still,  it  is  a  pity  that  artists,  in 
their  haste,  should  say  these  things  ;  for  when 
they  do  so  they,  too,  become  critics  of  the 
wrong  sort,  critics  insensitive  to  criticism. 
They  may  think  that  they  are  upholding  the 
cause  of  art ;  but  they  are  upholding  the  cause 
of  stupidity,  that  common  enemy  of  art  and  of 
criticism. 


57 


The  Artist  and  his  Audience         ^>^       -o 

ACCORDING  to  Whistler  art  is  not  a 
social  activity  at  all ;  according  to 
Tolstoy  it  is  nothing  else.  But  art  is  clearly 
a  social  activity  and  something  more ;  yet  no 
one  has  yet  reconciled  the  truth  in  Whistler's 
doctrine  with  the  truth  in  Tolstoy's.  Each 
leaves  out  an  essential  part  of  the  truth,  and 
they  remain  opposed  in  their  mixture  of  error 
and  truth.  The  main  point  of  Whistler's 
"Ten  o'clock"  is  that  art  is  not  a  social 
activity.  "  Listen,"  he  cries,  "  there  never  was 
an  artistic  period.  There  never  was  an  art- 
loving  nation.  In  the  beginning  man  went 
forth  each  day — some  to  battle,  some  to  the 
chase ;  others  again  to  dig  and  to  delve  in  the 
field — all  that  they  might  gain  and  live  or  lose 
and  die.  Until  there  was  found  among  them 
one,  differing  from  the  rest,  whose  pursuits 
attracted  him  not,  and  so  he  stayed  by  the 
tents  with  the  women,  and  traced  strange 
devices  with  a  burnt  stick  upon  a  gourd.  This 
man,  who  took  no  joy  in  the  ways  of  his 
58 


The  Artist  and  his  Audience 

brethren,  who  cared  not  for  conquest  and 
fretted  in  the  field,  this  designer  of  quaint 
patterns,  this  deviser  of  the  beautiful,  who 
perceived  in  Nature  about  him  curious  curv- 
ings,  as  faces  are  seen  m  the  fire — this  dreamer 
apart  was  the  first  artist." 

Then,  he  says,  the  hunters  and  the  workers 
drank  from  the  artists'  goblets,  "  taking  no 
note  the  while  of  the  craftsman's  pride,  and 
understanding  not  his  glory  in  his  work  ;  drink- 
ing at  the  cup  not  from  choice,  not  from  a 
consciousness  that  it  was  beautiful,  but  because, 
forsooth,  there  was  none  other ! "  Luxury 
grew,  and  the  great  ages  of  art  came.  "  Greece 
was  in  its  splendour,  and  art  reigned  supreme 
— by  force  of  fact,  not  by  election.  And  the 
people  questioned  not,  and  had  nothing  to 
say  in  the  matter."  In  fact  art  flourished 
because  mankind  did  not  notice  it.  But 
"  there  arose  a  new  class,  who  discovered 
the  cheap,  and  foresaw  fortune  in  the  manu- 
facture of  the  sham.""  Then,  according  to 
Whistler,  a  strange  thing  happened.  "The 
heroes  filled  from  the  jugs  and  drank  from 
the  bowls  —  with  understanding.  .  .  .  And 
the  people  —  this  time  —  had  much  to  say 
in  the  matter,  and  all  were  satisfied.  And 
Birmingham   and   Manchester   arose   in   their 

59 


Essays  on  Art 

might,  and  art  was  relegated  to  the  curiosity 
shop." 

Whistler  does  not  explain  why,  if  no  one  was 
aware  of  the  existence  of  art  except  the  artist, 
those  who  were  not  artists  began  to  imitate  it. 
If  no  one  prized  art,  why  should  sham  art  have 
come  into  existence  ?  According  to  him  it  was 
the  sham  that  made  men  aware  of  the  true ; 
yet  the  sham  could  not  exist  until  men  were 
aware  of  the  true.  But  the  account  he  gives 
of  the  decadence  of  art  is  historically  untrue  as 
well  as  unintelligible.  We  know  little  of  the 
primitive  artist ;  but  we  have  no  proof  that  he 
was  utterly  different  from  other  men,  or  that 
they  did  not  enjoy  his  activities.  If  they  had 
not  enjoyed  them  they  would  probably  have 
killed  him.  The  primitive  artist  survived,  no 
doubt,  because  he  was  an  artist  in  his  leisure ; 
and  all  we  know  of  more  primitive  art  goes  to 
prove  that  it  was,  and  is,  practised  not  by  a 
special  class  but  by  the  ordinary  primitive  man 
in  his  leisure.  Peasant  art  is  produced  by 
peasants,  not  by  lonely  artists.  Some,  of 
course,  have  more  gift  for  it  than  others,  but 
all  enjoy  it,  though  they  do  not  call  it  art. 
Whistler  saw  himself  in  every  primitive  artist ; 
and  seeing  himself  as  a  dreamer  apart  misunder- 
stood by  the  common  herd,  he  saw  the  primi- 
60 


The  Artist  and  his  Audience 

tive  artist  as  one  living  in  a  primitive  White 
House,  and  producing  primitive  nocturnes  for 
his  own  amusement,  unnoticed,  happily,  by 
primitive  critics. 

But  his  view,  though  refuted  both  by  history 
and  by  common  sense,  is  still  held  by  many 
artists  and  amateurs.  They  themselves  make 
much  of  art,  but  do  not  see  that  their  theory 
makes  little  of  it,  makes  it  a  mere  caprice  of 
the  human  mind,  like  the  collecting  of  postage 
stamps.  If  art  has  any  value  or  importance 
for  mankind,  it  is  because  it  is  a  social  activity. 
If  no  one  but  an  artist  can  enjoy  art,  it  seems 
to  follow  that  no  art  can  be  completely  enjoyed 
except  by  him  who  has  produced  it;  for  in 
relation  to  that  art  he  alone  is  an  artist.  All 
other  artists,  even,  are  the  public ;  and,  accord- 
ing to  Whistler,  the  public  has  nothing  to  do 
with  art ;  it  flourishes  best  when  they  are  not 
aware  of  its  existence.  He  is  very  contemptu- 
ous of  taste.  All  judgment  of  art  must  be 
based  on  expert  knowledge,  for  art,  he  says, 
"is  based  upon  laws  as  rigid  and  defined  as 
those  of  the  known  sciences."  Yet  whereas 
"no  polished  member  of  society  is  at  all 
affected  by  admitting  himself  neither  engineer, 
mathematician,  nor  astronomer,  and  therefore 
remains  willingly  discreet  and  taciturn  upon 
6i 


Essays  on  Art 

these  subjects,  still  he  would  be  highly  offended 
were  he  supposed  to  have  no  voice  in  what 
clearly  to  him  is  a  matter  of  taste,"  So  to 
Whistler  art  has  no  more  to  do  with  the  life 
of  the  ordinary  man  than  astronomy  or  mathe- 
matics. His  mention  of  engineering  is  an 
unfortunate  slip,  for,  although  we  are  not 
engineers  we  all  knew,  when  the  Tay  Bridge 
broke  down  and  threw  hundreds  of  passengers 
into  the  water,  that  it  was  not  a  good  bridge. 
We  are  all  concerned  with  engineering  in  spite 
of  our  ignorance  of  it,  because  we  make  use  of 
its  works.  Whistler  assumes  that  we  make  no 
use  of  works  of  art  except  as  objects  of  use ; 
and  since  pictures,  poems,  music  are  not  objects 
of  use,  we  can  have  no  concern  with  them  what- 
ever— which  is  absurd. 

But  here  comes  Tolstoy,  who  tells  us  that  all 
works  of  art  are  merely  objects  of  use  and  are 
to  be  judged  therefore  by  the  extent  of  their 
use.  A  work  of  art  that  few  can  enjoy  fails  as 
much  as  a  railway  that  few  can  travel  by. 
"Art,"  Tolstoy  says,  "is  a  human  activity, 
consisting  in  this — that  one  man  consciously, 
by  means  of  certain  external  signs,  hands  on  to 
others  feelings  he  has  lived  through,  and  that 
other  people  are  infected  by  these  feelings  and 
also  experience  them."  So  it  is  the  essence  of 
62 


The  Artist  and  his  Audience 

a  work  of  art  that  it  shall  infect  others  with 
the  feelings  of  the  artist.  Now  certainly  a 
work  of  art  is  a  work  of  art  to  us  only  if  it 
does  so  infect  us,  but  Tolstoy  is  not  content 
with  that.  The  individual  is  not  to  judge  the 
work  of  art  by  its  infection  of  himself.  He  is 
to  consider  also  the  extent  of  its  infection. 
"  For  a  work  to  be  esteemed  good  and  to  be 
approved  of  and  diffused  it  will  have  to  satisfy 
the  demands,  not  of  a  few  people  living  in 
identical  and  often  unnatiu-al  conditions,  but 
it  will  have  to  satisfy  the  demands  of  all  those 
great  masses  of  people  who  are  situated  in  the 
natural  conditions  of  laborious  life." 

The  two  views  are  utterly  irreconcilable. 
According  to  Whistler  the  public  are  not  to 
judge  art  at  all  because  they  have  no  concern 
with  it,  and  it  flourishes  most  when  they  do 
not  pretend  to  have  any  concern  with  it. 
According  to  Tolstoy  the  individual  is  to 
judge  it,  not  by  the  effect  it  produces  on  him, 
but  by  the  effect  it  produces  on  others,  "  on  all 
those  great  masses  of  people  who  are  situated 
in  the  natural  conditions  of  laborious  life." 

Now,  if  we  find  ourselves  intimidated  by  one 
or  other  of  these  views,  if  we  seem  forced  to 
accept  one  of  them  against  our  will,  it  is  a  relief 
and  liberation  from  the  tyranny  of  Whistler's 

63 


Essays  on   Art 

or  Tolstoy's  logic  to  ask  oui-selves  simply  what 
does  actually  happen  to  us  in  our  own  experi- 
ence and  enjoyment  of  a  work  of  art.  The 
fact  that  we  are  able  to  enjoy  and  experience  a 
work  of  art  does  liberate  us  at  once  from  the 
tyranny  of  Whistler ;  for  clearly,  if  we  can 
experience  and  enjoy  a  work  of  art,  we  are 
concerned  with  it.  It  is  vain  for  Whistler  to 
tell  us  that  we  ought  not  to  be,  or  that  we  do 
injury  to  art  by  our  concern.  The  fact  of  our 
enjoyment  and  experience  makes  art  for  us  a 
social  activity ;  we  know  that  our  enjoyment 
of  it  is  good ;  we  know  also  that  the  artist 
likes  us  to  enjoy  it ;  and  we  do  not  believe  that 
either  the  primitive  artist  or  the  primitive  man 
was  different  from  us  in  this  respect.  There  is 
now,  and  always  has  been,  some  kind  of  social 
relation  between  the  artist  and  the  public ;  the 
only  question  is  how  far  that  relation  is  the 
essence  of  art. 

Tolstoy  tells  us  that  it  is  the  essence  of  art, 
because  the  proper  aim  of  art  is  to  do  good. 
This  is  implied  in  his  doctrine  that  art  can  be 
good  only  if  it  is  intelligible  to  most  men. 
"  The  assertion  that  art  may  be  good  art  and 
at  the  same  time  incomprehensible  to  a  great 
number  of  people,  is  extremely  unjust ;  and  its 
consequences  are  ruinous  to  art  itself.''  The 
64 


The  Artist  and  his  Audience 

word  unjust  implies  the  moral  factor.  I  am 
not  to  enjoy  a  work  of  art  if  I  know  that 
others  cannot  enjoy  it,  because  it  is  not  fair 
that  I  should  have  a  pleasure  not  shared  by 
them.  If  I  know  that  others  cannot  share  it, 
I  am  to  take  no  account  of  my  own  experience, 
but  to  condemn  the  work,  however  good  it 
may  seem  to  me.  From  this  logic  also  I  can 
liberate  myself  by  concerning  myself  simply 
with  my  own  experience.  Again,  if  I  experi- 
ence and  enjoy  a  work  of  art,  I  know  that  my 
experience  of  it  is  good ;  and,  in  my  judgment 
of  the  work  of  art,  I  do  not  need  to  ask  myself 
how  many  others  enjoy  it.  I  may  wish  them 
to  enjoy  it  and  try  to  make  them  do  so,  but 
that  effort  of  mine  is  not  aesthetic  but  moral. 
It  does  not  affect  my  judgment  of  the  work  of 
art,  but  is  a  result  of  that  judgment.  And,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  if  I  am  to  experience  a  work 
of  art  at  all,  I  cannot  be  asking  myself  how 
many  others  enjoy  it.  Judgments  of  art  are 
not  formed  in  that  way  and  cannot  be ;  they 
are,  and  must  be,  always  formed  out  of  our 
own  experience  of  art.  If  art  is  to  be  art  to 
us,  we  cannot  think  of  it  in  terms  of  something 
else.  There  would  be  no  public  for  art  at  all 
if  we  all  agreed  to  judge  it  in  terms  of  each 
other's  enjoyment  or  understanding.  Each 
s  65 


Essays  on  Art 

individual  of  "  the  great  masses  of  people  who 
are  situated  in  the  natural  conditions  of 
laborious  life  '*  would  also  have  to  ask  himself 
whether  the  rest  of  the  masses  were  enjoying 
and  understanding,  before  he  could  judge; 
indeed,  he  would  not  feel  a  right  to  enjoy  until 
he  knew  that  the  rest  were  enjoying.  That  is 
to  say,  no  individual  would  ever  enjoy  art  at 
all.  The  fact  is  that  art  is  produced  by  the 
individual  artist  and  experienced  by  the  indi- 
vidual man.  Tolstoy  says  that  it  is  experienced 
by  mankind  in  the  mass,  and  not  as  individuals ; 
Whistler  that  it  is  not  experienced  at  all, 
either  by  the  mass  or  by  the  individual.  Each 
is  a  heretic  with  some  truth  in  his  heresy; 
what  is  the  true  doctrine  ? 

It  is  clear  that  every  artist  desires  an 
audience,  not  merely  so  that  he  may  win 
pudding  and  praise  from  them,  nor  so  that  he 
may  do  them  good ;  none  of  these  aims  will 
make  him  an  artist ;  he  can  accomplish  all  of 
them  without  attempting  to  produce  a  work  of 
art.  It  is  also  clear  that  his  artistic  success  is 
not  his  success  in  winning  an  audience.  Those 
"great  masses  of  people  who  are  situated  in 
the  natural  conditions  of  laborious  life "  are  a 
figment  of  Tolstoy's  mind.  No  conditions  are 
natural  in  the  sense  in  which  he  uses  the  word ; 
66 


The  Artist  and  his  Audience 

nor  do  any  existing  conditions  make  one  man  a 
better  judge  of  art  than  another.  There  is  no 
multitude  of  simple,  normal,  unspoilt  men  able 
and  willing  to  enjoy  any  real  art  that  is  pre- 
sented to  them.  The  right  experience  of  art 
comes  with  effort,  like  right  thought  and  right 
action ;  and  no  Russian  peasant  has  it  because 
he  works  in  the  fields.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand, 
are  there  any  artists  who  are  mere  "sports" 
occupied  with  a  queer  game  of  their  own  self- 
expression  which  no  one  else  can  enjoy.  There 
is  a  necessary  relation  between  the  work  of  art 
and  its  audience,  even  if  no  actual  audience  for 
it  exists ;  and  the  fact  that  this  relation  must 
be,  even  when  there  is  no  audience  in  existence, 
is  the  paradox  and  problem  of  art.  A  work  of 
art  claims  an  audience,  entreats  it,  is  indeed 
made  for  it ;  but  must  have  it  on  its  own 
terms.  Men  are  artists  because  they  are  men, 
because  they  have  a  faculty,  at  its  height, 
which  is  shared  by  all  men.  In  that  Croce  is 
right ;  and  his  doctrine  that  all  men  are  artists 
in  some  degree,  and  that  the  very  experience  of 
art  is  itself  an  aesthetic  activity,  contains  a 
truth  of  great  value.  But  his  aesthetic  ignores, 
or  seems  to  ignore,  the  fact  that  art  is  not 
merely,  as  he  calls  it,  expression,  but  is  also  a 
means  of  address ;  in  fact,  that  we  do  not 
67 


Essays  on  Art 

express  ourselves  except  when  we  address  our- 
selves to  others,  even  though  we  speak  to  no 
particular,  or  even  existing,  audience.  Yet 
this  fact  is  obvious ;  for  all  art  gets  its  very 
form  from  the  fact  that  it  is  a  method  of 
address.  A  story  is  a  story  because  it  is  told, 
and  told  to  some  one  not  the  teller.  A  picture 
is  a  picture  because  it  is  painted  to  be  seen. 
It  has  all  its  artistic  qualities  because  it  is 
addressed  to  the  eye.  And  music  is  music, 
and  has  the  form  which  makes  it  music, 
because  it  is  addressed  to  the  ear.  Without 
this  intention  of  address  there  could  be  no 
form  in  art  and  no  distinction  between  art  and 
day-dreaming.  Day-dreaming  is  not  expres- 
sion, is  not  art,  because  it  is  addressed  to  no 
one  but  is  a  purposeless  activity  of  the  mind. 
It  becomes  art  only  when  there  is  the  purpose 
of  address  in  it.  That  purpose  will  give  it 
form  and  turn  it  from  day-dreaming  into  art. 
Even  in  an  object  of  use  which  is  also  a  work 
of  art,  the  art  is  the  effort  of  the  maker  to 
emphasize,  that  is,  to  point  out,  the  beauty  of 
that  which  he  has  made.  It  is  this  emphasis 
that  turns  building  into  architecture ;  and  it 
implies  that  the  building  is  made  not  merely 
for  the  builder's  or  for  anyone  else's  use,  but 
that  its  aim  also  is  to  address  an  audience,  to 
68 


The  Artist  and  his  Audience 

speak  to  the  eye  as  a  picture  speaks  to  it.  Art 
is  made  for  men  as  surely  as  boots  are  made  for 
them. 

But  not  as  Tolstoy  thinks,  for  any  particular 
class  of  men  or  even  for  the  whole  mass  of 
existing  mankind.  The  artist  will  not  and 
cannot  judge  his  work  by  its  effects  on  any 
actual  men,  any  more  than  we  can  or  will 
judge  it  by  its  effects  on  anyone  except  our- 
selves. As  we,  in  our  experience  of  it,  must 
be  completely  individual ;  so  must  he  in  his 
pioduction  of  it.  He  is  not  a  public  servant, 
but  a  man  speaking  for  himself,  and  with  no 
thought  of  effects,  to  anyone  who  will  hear. 
His  audience  consists  only  of  those  who  will 
hear,  of  those  individuals  who  can  understand 
his  individual  expression  which  is  also  com- 
munication. In  his  art  he  seeks  the  individual 
who  will  hear.  He  has  something  to  say ;  but 
he  can  say  it  only  to  others,  not  to  himself;  it 
is  what  it  is  because  he  says  it  to  others.  Yet 
he  says  it  also  for  its  own  sake  and  not  for 
theirs.  The  particular  likes  and  dislikes, 
stupidities,  limitations,  demands,  of  individual 
men  or  classes  are  nothing  to  him.  The  con- 
dition of  his  art  is  this  alone,  that  he  does 
address  it  to  an  audience.  So  the  relation 
between  the  artist  and  his  audience  is  the  most 
69 


Essays  on  Art 

important  fact  of  his  art,  even  if  he  has  no 
actual  audience.  It  is  his  attitude  towards 
the  audience  that  makes  him  do  his  best  or  his 
worst,  makes  him  a  good  artist  or  a  bad  one, 
that  sets  him  free  to  express  all  he  has  to  say 
or  hampers  him  with  inhibitions.  His  business 
is  not  to  find  an  audience,  but  to  find  the  right 
attitude  towards  one,  the  attitude  which  is 
that  of  the  artist  and  not  of  the  tradesman,  or 
peacock,  or  philanthropist.  And  it  is  plain 
that  in  his  effort  to  find  this  right  attitude  he 
may  be  helped  or  hindered  much  by  his  actual 
fellow-men.  The  artist  is  also  a  man  and  sub- 
ject to  all  the  temptations  of  men.  Whistler, 
when  he  said  that  art  happens,  ignored  this 
fact,  ignored  the  whole  social  relation  of  man- 
kind and  the  whole  history  of  the  arts ;  while 
Tolstoy  ignored  no  less  the  mind  of  the  artist, 
and  the  minds  of  all  those  who  do  actually 
experience  art.  To  Whistler  the  artist  is  a 
Chimcera  bomb'mans  in  vaaio  ;  to  Tolstoy  he  is 
a  philanthropist.  For  Whistler  the  public  has 
no  function  whatever  in  relation  to  art ;  for 
Tolstoy  the  artist  himself  has  no  function 
whatever  except  a  moral  one.  In  fact  he 
denies  the  existence  of  the  artist,  as  Whistler 
denies  the  existence  of  the  public.  Whistler's 
truth  is  that  the  public  must  not  tell  the  artist 
70 


The  Artist  and  his  Audience 

what  he  is  to  do ;  Tolstoy's,  that  a  public  with 
a  right  relation  to  the  artist  will  help  the  artist 
to  have  a  right  relation  to  the  public. 

Artists  are  not  "  sports,"  but  men  ;  and  men 
engaged  in  one  of  the  most  difficult  of  human 
activities.  They  are  subject  to  aesthetic 
temptation  and  sin,  as  all  men  are  subject  to 
temptation  and  sin  of  all  kinds.  Their  public 
may  tempt  them  to  think  more  of  themselves 
than  of  what  they  have  to  express,  either  by 
perverse  admiration  or  by  ignorant  contempt. 
An  actual  audience  may  be  an  obstruction 
between  them  and  the  ideal  audience  to  which 
every  artist  should  address  himself.  Every 
artist  must  desire  that  his  ideal  audience  should 
exist,  and  may  mistake  an  actual  audience  for 
it.  In  the  ideal  relation  between  an  artist  and 
his  audience,  it  is  the  universal  in  him  that 
speaks  to  the  universal  in  them,  and  yet  this 
universal  finds  an  intensely  personal  expression. 
Art,  which  is  personal  expression,  tells,  not  of 
what  the  artist  wants,  but  of  what  he  values. 
But  if  his  ego  is  provoked  by  the  ego  in  a 
particular  audience,  then  he  begins  to  tell  of 
what  he  wants  or  of  what  they  want.  The 
audience  may  demand  of  him  that  he  shall 
please  them  by  indulging  their  particular 
vanities,  appetites,  sentimental  desires,  that  he 

71 


Essays  on  Art 

shall  present  life  to  them  as  they  wish  it  to  be  ; 
and  if  he  yields  to  that  demand  it  is  because  of 
the  demands  of  his  own  particular  ego.  There 
is  a  transaction  between  him  and  that  audience, 
in  its  essence  commercial.  His  art  is  the 
particular  supplying  some  kind  of  goods  to  the 
particular,  not  the  universal  pouring  itself  out 
to  the  universal. 

The  function  of  the  audience  is  not  to 
demand  but  to  receive.  It  should  not  allow 
its  own  expectations  to  hinder  its  receptiveness ; 
to  that  extent  Whistler  is  right.  Art  happens 
as  the  beauty  of  the  universe  happens ;  and  it 
is  the  business  of  the  audience  to  experience  it, 
not  to  dictate  how  it  shall  happen.  It  has 
been  said:  It  is  not  we  who  judge  works  of 
art ;  they  judge  us.  The  artist  speaks  and  we 
listen  ;  but  still  he  speaks  to  us  and  by  listen- 
ing wisely  we  help  him  to  speak  his  best,  for 
man  is  a  social  being ;  and  all  life,  in  so  far  as 
it  is  what  it  wishes  to  be,  is  a  fellowship. 
Never  is  it  so  completely  a  fellowship  as  in  the 
relation  between  an  artist  and  his  audience. 
There  Tolstoy  is  right,  but  the  fellowship  has 
to  be  achieved  by  both  the  artist  and  the 
audience.  There  is  no  body  of  simple  peasants, 
any  more  than  there  are  rich  or  cultured 
people,  to  whom  he  must  address  himself  or 
72 


The  Artist  and  his  Audience 

whose  demands  he  must  satisfy.  Art  that 
tries  to  satisfy  any  particular  demand  is  of  use 
neither  to  the  flesh  nor  to  the  spirit.  It  is 
neither  meat  nor  music.  But  where  all  is  well 
with  it,  the  spirit  in  the  artist  speaks  to  the 
spirit  in  his  audience.  There  is  a  common 
quality  in  both,  with  which  he  speaks  and  they 
listen ;  and  where  this  common  quality  is  found 
art  thrives. 


7Z 


Wilfulness  and  Wisdom       ^        ^       o 

THERE  are  people  to  whom  the  war  was 
merely  the  running  amuck  of  a  criminal 
lunatic ;  and  they  get  what  pleasure  they  can 
from  calling  that  lunatic  all  the  names  they 
can  think  of.  To  them  the  Germans  are 
different  in  kind  from  all  other  peoples,  utterly 
separated  from  the  rest  of  us  by  their  crimes. 
We  could  learn  nothing  from  them  except  how 
to  crush  them ;  and,  having  done  so,  we  shall 
need  to  learn  nothing  except  how  to  keep 
them  down.  But  such  minds  never  learn  any- 
thing from  experience,  because  they  believe 
that  there  is  nothing  to  be  learnt.  They  con- 
sume all  their  mental  energy  in  anger  and  the 
expression  of  it ;  and  in  doing  so  they  grow 
more  and  more  like  those  with  whom  they  are 
angry.  Wisdom  always  goes  contrary  to  what 
our  passions  tell  us,  especially  when  they  take 
the  form  of  righteous  indignation.  The  creative 
power  of  the  mind  begins  with  refusal  of  all 
those  tempting  fierce  delights  which  the  passions 
offer  to  it.     Wisdom  must  be  cold  before  it  can 

74 


Wilfulness  and  Wisdom 

become  warm  ;  it  must  suppress  the  comforting 
heat  of  the  flesh  before  it  can  kindle  with  the 
pure  fire  of  the  spirit.  Above  all,  when  we 
say  that  we  are  not  as  other  men,  as  the 
Germans,  for  instance,  it  must  insist  that  we 
are,  and  that  we  shall  avoid  the  German  crime 
only  by  recognizing  our  likeness  to  those  who 
have  committed  it. 

The  Germans  have  committed  the  great 
crime ;  but  they  have  been  born  and  nurtured 
in  an  atmosphere  which  made  that  crime  pos- 
sible; and  we  live  in  the  same  atmosphere. 
Their  error,  though  they  carried  it  to  an 
extreme  in  theory  and  in  practice  with  the 
native  extravagance  of  their  race,  is  the  en*or 
of  the  whole  Western  world ;  and  we  shall  not 
understand  what  it  is  unless  we  are  aware  of  it 
in  ourselves  as  well  as  in  thera.  For  it  is  a 
world-error  and  one  against  which  men  have 
been  warned  for  ages ;  but  in  their  pride  they 
will  not  listen  to  the  warning.  Many  of  the 
old  warnings,  in  the  Gospels  and  elsewhere, 
sound  like  platitudes  to  us ;  we  expect  the 
clergyman  to  repeat  them  in  church ;  but  we 
should  never  think  of  applying  them  to  this 
great,  successful,  progressive  Western  world  of 
ours.  If  we  are  not  happy ;  if  we  do  not  even 
see  the  way  to  happiness;    if  all  our  power 

75 


Essays  on  Art 

merely  helps  us  to  destroy  each  other,  or  to 
make  the  rich  more  vulgarly  rich  and  the  poor 
more  squalidly  poor ;  if  the  great  energy  of 
Germany  has  hurried  her  to  her  own  ruin ; 
still  we  do  not  ask  whether  we  may  not  have 
made  some  fundamental  mistake  about  our 
own  nature  and  the  nature  of  the  universe,  and 
whether  Germany  has  not  merely  made  it  more 
systematically  and  more  philosophically  than 
the  rest  of  us. 

But  the  German,  because  he  is  systematic 
and  philosophical,  may  reveal  to  us  what  that 
error  is  in  us  as  well  as  in  himself.  We  do  not 
state  it  as  if  it  were  a  splendid  truth ;  we 
merely  act  upon  it.  He  stated  it  for  us  with 
such  histrionic  and  towering  absurdity  that  we 
can  laugh  at  his  statement  of  it ;  but  we  must 
not  laugh  at  him  without  learning  to  laugh  at 
ourselves.  All  this  talk  about  the  iron  will, 
about  set  teeth  and  ruthlessness,  what  does  it 
mean  except  that  the  German  chose  to  glorify 
openly  and  to  carry  to  a  logical  extreme  the 
peculiar  error  of  the  whole  Western  world — 
the  belief  that  the  highest  function  of  man  is 
to  work  his  will  upon  people  and  things  out- 
side him,  that  he  can  change  the  world  without 
changing  himself? 

The  Christian  doctrine,  preached  so  long  in 
76 


Wilfulness  and  Wisdom 

vain  and  now  almost  forgotten,  is  the  opposite 
of  this.  It  insists  that  man  is  by  nature  a 
passive,  an  experiencing  creature,  and  that  he 
can  do  nothing  well  in  action  unless  he  has 
first  learned  a  right  passivity.  Only  by  that 
passivity  can  he  enrich  himself;  and  when  he 
has  enriched  himself  he  will  act  rightly.  Man 
has  a  will ;  but  he  must  apply  it  at  the  right 
point,  or  it  will  seem  to  him  merely  a  blind 
impulse.  He  must  apply  it  to  the  manner  in 
which  he  experiences  things ;  he  must  free  him- 
self from  his  "  will  to  live ""  or  his  "  will  to 
power,"  and  see  all  men  and  things  not  as  they 
are  of  material  use  to  him,  but  with  the  object 
of  loving  whatever  there  is  of  beauty  or  virtue 
in  them.  His  will,  in  fact,  must  be  the  will  to 
love,  which  is  the  will  to  experience  in  a  certain 
way ;  and  out  of  that  will  to  love  right  action 
will  naturally  ensue.  Is  this  a  platitude  ?  If 
it  is,  it  is  flatly  contradicted  by  the  German 
doctrine  of  wilfulness.  For  the  Germanic  hero 
exercises  his  will  always  upon  other  men  and 
things,  not  upon  himself;  and  we  all  admire 
this  Germanic  hero,  when  he  is  not  an  obvious 
danger  to  us  all,  and  when  he  is  not  made 
ridiculous  by  the  German  presentment  of  him. 
We  all  believe  that  the  will  is  to  be  exercised 
first  of  all  in  action,  that  it  is  the  function  of 

17 


Essays  on  Art 

the  great  man  to  change  the  world,  not 
to  change  himself.  To  us  the  great  man  is 
one  who  does  work  a  change  upon  the  world, 
no  matter  what  that  change  may  be.  He  may 
change  it  only  as  an  explosion  changes  things, 
and  at  the  end  he  may  be  left  among  the  ruins 
he  has  made ;  but  still  we  admire  him.  We 
compare  him  to  the  forces  of  nature,  we  say 
that  there  is  "something  elemental''  in  him, 
even  though  he  has  been  merely  an  elemental 
nuisance.  We  value  force  in  itself,  and  do  not 
asli  what  it  can  find  to  value  in  itself  when  it 
has  exhausted  itself  upon  the  world.  But  out 
of  this  worship  of  wilfulness  there  comes,  sooner 
or  later,  a  profound  scepticism  and  discourage- 
ment. For  while  these  wilful  heroes  do  pro- 
duce some  violent  effect,  it  is  not  the  effect 
they  aimed  at.  Something  happens ;  some- 
thing has  happened  to  Germany  as  the  result 
of  Bismarck's  wilfulness ;  but  it  is  not  what  he 
willed.  The  wilfuj  hero  is  a  cause  in  that  he 
acts ;  but  the  effect  is  not  what  he  designed, 
and  so  he  seems  to  himself,  and  to  the  world, 
only  a  link  in  an  unending  chain  of  cause  and 
effect ;  and  as  for  his  sense  of  will,  it  is  nothing 
but  the  illusion  that  he  is  all  cause  and  not  at 
all  effect. 

Qii£m    Dens    vult    perdtre    dementat   prius. 
78 


Wilfulness  and  Wisdom 

That  old  tag  puts  a  truth  wrongly.  God  does 
not  interfere  to  afflict  the  wilful  man  with 
madness,  but  he  has  never  thrown  himself  open 
to  the  wisdom  of  God.  His  mind  is  like  a 
machine  that  acts  with  increasing  speed  and 
fury  because  there  is  less  and  less  material  for 
it  to  act  upon.  One  act  leads  to  another  in  a 
blind  chain  of  cause  and  effect ;  he  does  this 
merely  because  he  has  done  that,  and  seems  to 
be  driven  by  fate  on  and  on  to  his  own  ruin. 
So  it  was  with  Napoleon  in  his  later  years. 
He  had  lost  the  sense  of  any  reality  whatever 
except  his  own  action ;  he  saw  the  world  as  a 
passive  object  to  be  acted  upon  by  himself. 
And  that  is  how  the  Germans  saw  it  two  years 
ago.  They  could  not  understand  that  it  was 
possible  for  the  world  to  react  against  them. 
It  was  merely  something  that  they  were  going 
to  remake,  to  work  their  will  upon.  The  war, 
at  its  beginning,  was  not  to  them  a  conflict 
between  human  beings ;  it  was  a  process  by 
which  they  would  make  of  things  what  they 
willed.  There  was  no  reality  except  in  them- 
selves and  their  own  will ;  for,  in  their  worship 
of  action,  they  had  lost  the  sense  of  external 
reality,  they  had  come  to  believe  that  there 
was  nothing  to  learn  from  it  except  what  a 
craftsman  learns  from  his  material  by  working 

79 


Essays  on  Art 

in  it.  It  is  by  making  that  he  learns;  and 
they  thought  that  there  was  no  learning  except 
by  making. 

But  that  is  the  mistake  of  the  whole  Western 
world,  though  we  have  none  of  us  carried  it  so 
far  as  Germany.  Other  men  are  to  us  still 
men,  they  still  have  some  reality  to  us ;  but 
we  see  external  reality  as  a  material  for  us  to 
work  in ;  we  are  to  ourselves  entirely  active 
and  not  at  all  passive  beings.  Even  among  all 
the  evil  and  sorrow  of  the  war  we  still  took  a 
pride  in  the  enormous  power  of  our  instruments 
of  destruction,  as  if  we  were  children  playing 
with  big,  dangerous  toys.  But  these  toys 
are  themselves  the  product  of  a  society  that 
must  always  be  making  and  never  thinking  or 
feeling.  They  express  the  will  for  action  that 
has  ousted  the  will  to  experience ;  and  all  the 
changes  which  we  work  on  the  face  of  the 
earth  express  that  will  too.  We  could  not 
live  in  the  cities  we  have  made  for  ourselves  if 
we  thought  that  we  had  anything  to  learn 
from  the  beauty  of  the  earth.  They  are  for  us 
merely  places  in  which  we  learn  to  act,  in 
which  no  one  could  learn  to  think  or  feel. 
Passive  experience  is  impossible  in  them  and 
they  do  not  consider  the  possibility  of  it. 
So  they  express  in  every  building,  in  every 
80 


Wilfulness  and  Wisdom 

object,  in  the  very  clothes  of  their  inhabit- 
ants, an  utter  poverty  of  passive  expei'ience. 
In  what  we  make  we  give  out  no  stored 
riches  of  the  mind ;  we  make  only  so  that  we 
may  act,  never  so  that  we  may  express  our- 
selves ;  and  we  have  little  art  because  our 
making  is  entirely  wilful.  Our  attempts  at 
art  are  themselves  entirely  wilful.  We  will 
have  art,  we  say  ;  and  so  we  plaster  our  utilities 
with  the  ornaments  of  the  past,  as  if  we  could 
get  the  richness  of  experience  secondhand  from 
our  ancestors.  And  in  the  same  way  we  are 
always  finding  for  our  blind  activities  moral 
motives,  those  motives  which  are  real  only 
when  they  spring  out  of  right  experience.  We 
rationalize  all  that  we  do,  but  the  rationalizing 
is  secondhand  ornament  to  blind  impulse ;  it 
is  an  attempt  to  persuade  ourselves  that  our 
actions  spring  out  of  the  experience  which  we 
lack.  There  is  among  us  an  incessant  activity 
both  of  thought  and  of  art ;  but  much  of  it  is 
entirely  wilful.  The  thinker  makes  theories  to 
justify  what  is  done ;  he,  too,  sees  all  life  in 
terms  of  action,  he  is  the  parasite  of  action. 
For  a  German  professor  the  whole  process  of 
history  was  but  a  prelude  to  the  wilfulness  of 
Germany  ;  he  could  not  experience  the  past 
except  in  terms  of  what  Germany  willed  to  do  ; 
F  8i 


Essays  on  Art 

and  the  aim  of  his  theorizing  was  to  remove 
all  scrupulous  impediments  to  the  action  of 
Germany  which  she  may  have  inherited  from 
the  past.  Think  so  that  you  may  be  stronger 
to  do  what  you  wish  to  do ;  that  is  the  modern 
notion  of  thought,  and  that  is  the  reason  why 
we  throw  up  theories  so  easily  ;  for  thinking  of 
this  kind  needs  no  experience,  it  needs  merely 
an  activity  of  the  mind,  the  activity  which 
collects  facts  and  does  with  them  what  it  will. 
And  these  theories  are  eagerly  accepted  so 
long  as  the  impulse  lasts  which  they  justify. 
When  that  is  spent  they  are  forgotten,  and 
new  theories  take  their  place  to  justify  fresh 
impulses.  And  so  it  is  with  the  incessant  new 
movements  in  art.  Art  now  is  conceived 
entirely  as  action.  The  artist  is  as  wilful  as 
the  Germanic  hero  ;  the  will  to  make  excludes 
in  him  the  will  to  experience.  The  painter 
cannot  look  at  the  visible  world  without  con- 
sidering at  once  what  kind  of  picture  he  will 
make  of  it.  It  is  to  him  mere  passive  material 
for  his  artistic  will,  not  an  independent  reality 
to  enrich  his  mind  so  that  it  will  give  out  its 
riches  in  the  form  of  art.  And  as  he  is  always 
willing  to  make  pictures  so  he  must  will  the 
kind  of  pictures  he  will  make,  as  the  Germans 
willed  the  kind  of  world  they  would  make. 
82 


Wilfulness  and  Wisdom 

But  this  willing  of  his  is  a  kind  of  theorizing 
to  justify  his  own  action ;  and  it  changes  in- 
cessantly because  he  never  can  be  satisfied  with 
his  own  poverty  of  experience.  But  still  he 
will  do  anything  rather  than  try  to  enrich  that 
poverty. 

And  that  is  the  secret  of  all  our  restless- 
ness, the  restlessness  that  forced  the  Germans 
into  the  folly  and  crime  of  war.  We  are 
always  dissatisfied  with  our  poverty  of  experi- 
ence ;  and  we  try  to  get  rid  of  our  dissatisfac- 
tion in  more  blind  activity,  throwing  up  new 
theories  all  the  while  as  reasons  why  we  should 
act.  We  fidget  about  the  earth  as  if  we  were 
children,  that  could  not  read,  left  in  a  library ; 
and,  like  them,  we  do  mischief.  And  that  is 
just  what  we  are :  children  that  have  not  learnt 
to  read  let  loose  upon  the  library  of  the  uni- 
verse ;  and  all  that  we  can  do  is  to  pull  the 
books  about  and  play  games  with  them  and 
scribble  on  their  pages.  Everywhere  the  earth 
is  defaced  with  our  meaningless  scribbling,  and 
we  tell  ourselves  that  it  means  something 
because  we  want  to  scribble.  Or  sometimes  we 
tell  ourselves  that  there  is  no  meaning  in  any- 
thing, no  more  in  the  books  than  in  our 
scribble. 

The  only  remedy  is  that  we  should  learn  to 

83 


Essays  on  Art 

read ;  and  for  this  we  need  above  all  things 
humility ;  not  merely  the  personal  humility  of 
a  man  who  knows  that  other  men  excel  him, 
but  a  generic  humility  which  acknowledges 
in  the  universe  a  greater  wisdom,  power, 
righteousness  than  his  own.  That  is  formally 
acknowledged  by  our  religion,  but  it  is  not 
practically  acknowledged  in  our  way  of  life,  in 
our  conduct  or  our  thought.  We  think  and 
feel  and  behave  as  if  we  were  the  best  and 
wisest  creatures  in  the  universe,  as  if  it  existed 
only  for  us  to  make  use  of  it ;  and  in  so  far  eis 
we  learn  from  it  at  all,  we  learn  only  to  make 
use  of  it.  That  is  our  idea  of  knowledge  and 
wisdom ;  more  and  more  it  is  our  idea  of 
science ;  and  as  for  philosophy,  we  pay  no  heed 
to  it  because,  in  its  nature,  it  is  not  concerned 
with  making  use  of  things.  In  every  way  we 
betray  the  fact  that  we  cannot  listen  humbly, 
because  we  do  not  believe  there  is  anything  to 
listen  to.  For  a  few  of  the  devout  God  spoke 
long  ago,  but  He  is  not  speaking  now.  *'  The 
kings  of  modern  thought  are  dumb,"  said 
Matthew  Arnold ;  but  that  is  because  every- 
thing outside  the  mind  of  man  is  dumb;  all 
must  be  dumb  to  those  who  will  not  listen. 
If  we  assume  that  there  is  no  intelligence  any- 
where but  in  ourselves,  we  shall  find  none  any- 
84 


Wilfulness  and  Wisdom 

where  else.  There  will  be  no  meaning  for  us 
in  anything  but  our  own  actions;  and  they 
will  become  more  and  more  meaningless  to  us  as 
they  become  more  and  more  wilful,  until  at  last 
we  shall  be  to  ourselves  like  squirrels  in  a  cage, 
or  prisoners  on  a  universal  treadmill.  Years 
ago  the  war  must  have  seemed  a  meaningless 
treadmill  to  the  Germans,  but  they  cannot 
escape  from  its  consequences ;  they  have  done 
and  they  must  suffer.  But  will  they  learn  from 
their  sufferings,  shall  we  all  learn,  that  doing 
is  not  everything?  Are  we  humbled  enough 
to  listen  to  the  wisdom  of  the  ages,  which  tells 
us  that  we  can  be  wise  only  if  we  listen  for  a 
wisdom  that  is  not  ours  ? 


85 


"The  Magic  Flute"   ^       -£>       ^e>       ^ 

WHEN  The  Maggie  Flute  was  produced 
by  the  already  dying  Mozart  it  had 
little  success.  At  the  first  performance,  it  is 
said,  when  the  applause  was  faint,  the  leader 
of  the  orchestra  stole  up  to  Mozart,  who  was 
conducting,  and  kissed  his  hand ;  and  Mozart 
stroked  him  on  the  head.  We  may  guess  that 
the  leader  knew  what  the  music  meant  and 
that  Mozart  knew  that  he  knew.  Neither 
could  put  it  into  words  and  it  is  not  put  into 
words  in  the  libretto.  But  the  libretto  need 
not  be  an  obstruction  to  the  meaning  of  the 
music  if  only  the  audience  will  not  ask  them- 
selves what  the  libretto  means.  After  Mozart's 
death  the  opera  was  successful,  no  doubt  because 
the  audience  had  given  up  asking  what  the 
libretto  meant  and  had  learnt  something  of  the 
meaning  of  the  music. 

There  are  worse  librettos — librettos  which 
have  some  clear   unmusical   meaning  of  their 
own  beyond  which  the  audience  cannot  pene- 
trate to  the  meaning  of  the  music,  if  it  has 
86 


"The  Magic  Flute" 

any.  This  libretto,  apart  from  the  music,  is 
so  nearly  meaningless,  it  has  so  little  coherence, 
that  one  can  easily  pass  through  it  to  the 
music.  The  author,  Schickaneder,  was  Mozarfs 
friend,  and  he  had  wit  enough  to  understand 
the  mood  of  Mozart.  That  mood  does  express 
itself  in  the  plot  and  the  incidents  of  the 
libretto,  although  in  them  it  is  empty  of  value 
or  passion.  Schickaneder,  in  fact,  constructed 
a  mere  diagram  to  which  Mozart  gave  life. 
The  life  is  all  in  the  music,  but  the  diagram 
has  its  use,  in  that  it  supplies  a  shape,  which 
we  recognize,  to  the  life  of  the  music.  The 
characters  live  in  the  music,  but  in  the  words 
they  tell  us  something  about  themselves  which 
enables  us  to  understand  their  musical  speech 
better.  Papageno  tells  us  that  he  is  a  bird- 
catcher  and  a  child  of  nature.  The  words  are 
labels,  but  through  them  we  pass  more  quickly 
to  an  understanding  of  his  song.  Only  we 
shall  miss  that  understanding  if  we  try  to  reach 
it  through  the  words,  if  we  look  for  the  story 
of  the  opera  in  them.  In  the  words  the  events 
of  the  opera  have  no  connexion  with  each  other. 
There  is  no  reason  why  one  should  follow 
another.  The  logic  of  it  is  all  in  the  music, 
for  the  music  creates  a  world  in  which  events 
happen  naturally,  in  which  one  tune  springs 
87 


Essays  on  Art 

out  of  another,  or  conflicts  with  it,  like  the 
forces  of  nature  or  the  thoughts  and  actions  of 
man.  This  world  is  the  universe  as  Mozart 
sees  it ;  and  the  whole  opera  is  an  expression 
of  his  peculiar  faith.  It  is  therefore  a  religious 
work,  though  free  from  that  meaningless  and 
timid  solemnity  which  we  associate  with  re- 
ligion. Mozart,  in  this  world,  was  like  an 
angel  who  could  not  but  laugh,  though  without 
any  malice,  at  all  the  bitter  earnestness  of  man- 
kind. Even  the  wicked  were  only  absurd  to 
him  ;  they  were  naughty  children  whom,  if  one 
had  the  spell,  one  could  enchant  into  goodness. 
And  in  The  Maggie  Flute  the  spell  works.  It 
works  in  the  flute  itself  and  in  Papageno's  lyre 
when  the  wicked  negro  Monostatos  threatens 
him  and  Tamino  with  his  ugly  attendants. 
Papageno  has  only  to  play  a  beautiful  childish 
tune  on  his  lyre  and  the  attendants  all  march 
backwards  to  an  absurd  goose-step  in  time  with 
it.  They  are  played  off'  the  stage;  and  the 
music  convinces  one  that  they  must  yield  to  it. 
So,  we  feel  if  we  had  had  the  music,  we  could 
have  made  the  Pi'ussians  march  their  goose-step 
back  to  Potsdam  ;  so  we  could  play  all  solemn 
perversity  off*  the  stage  of  life.  If  we  had  the 
music — but  there  is  solemn  pei'versity  in  us  too ; 
by  reason  of  which  we  can  hardly  listen  to  the 
88 


**The  Magic  Flute" 

music,  much  less  play  it,  hardly  listen  to  it  or 
understand  it  even  when  Mozart  makes  it  for 
us.  For  he  had  the  secret  of  it ;  he  was  a 
philosopher  who  spoke  in  music  and  so  simply 
that  the  world  missed  his  wisdom  and  thought 
that  he  was  just  a  beggar  playing  tunes  in  the 
street.  A  generation  ago  he  was  commonly 
said  to  be  too  tuney,  as  you  might  say  that  a 
flower  was  too  flowery.  People  would  no  more 
consider  him  than  they  would  consider  the 
lilies  of  the  field.  They  preferred  Wagner  in 
all  his  glory. 

Even  now  you  can  enjoy  The  Magic  Flute  as 
a  more  than  usually  absurd  musical  comedy 
with  easy,  old-fashioned  tunes.  You  can  enjoy 
it  anyway,  if  you  are  not  solemn  about  it,  as 
you  can  enjoy  Hamlet  for  a  bloody  melodrama. 
But,  like  Hamlet,  it  has  depths  and  depths  of 
meaning  beyond  our  full  comprehension.  Papa- 
geno  is  a  pantomime  figure,  but  he  is  also  one 
of  the  greatest  figures  in  the  drama  of  the 
world.  He  is  everyman,  like  Hamlet,  if  only 
we  had  the  wit  to  recognize  ourselves  in  him. 
Or  rather  he  is  that  element  in  us  which  we  all 
like  and  despise  in  others,  but  which  we  will 
never  for  one  moment  confess  to  in  ourselves — 
the  coward,  the  boaster,  the  liar,  but  the  child 
of  nature.  He,  because  he  knows  himself  for 
89 


Essays  on  Art 

all  of  these,  can  find  his  home  in  Sarostro's 
paradise.  He  does  not  want  Sarostro's  high 
wisdom ;  what  he  does  want  is  a  Papagena,  an 
Eve,  a  child  of  nature  like  himself;  and  she  is 
given  to  him.  He  has  the  wit  to  recognize 
his  mate,  almost  a  bird  like  himself,  and  to 
them  Mozart  gives  their  bird-duet,  so  that, 
when  they  sing  it,  we  feel  that  we  might  all 
sing  it  together.  It  is  not  above  our  capacity 
of  understanding  or  delight.  The  angel  has 
learnt  our  earthly  tongue,  but  transformed  it 
so  that  he  makes  a  heaven  of  the  earth,  a 
heaven  that  is  not  too  high  or  difficult  for  us, 
a  wild-wood  heaven,  half-absurd,  in  which  we 
can  laugh  as  well  as  sing,  and  in  which  the 
angels  will  laugh  at  us  and  with  us,  laugh  our 
silly  sorrows  into  joy. 

There  is  Mozart  himself  in  Papageno,  the 
faun  domesticated  and  sweetened  by  centuries 
of  Christian  experience,  yet  still  a  faun  and 
always  ready  to  play  a  trick  on  human 
solemnity ;  and  in  this  paradise  which  Mozart 
makes  for  us  the  faun  has  his  place  and  a 
beauty  not  incongruous  with  it,  like  the  imps 
and  gargoyles  of  a  Gothic  church.  At  any 
moment  the  music  will  turn  from  sublimity 
into  fun,  and  in  a  moment  it  can  turn  back  to 
sublimity ;  and  always  the  change  seems  natural. 
90 


"The  Magic  Flute" 

It  is  like  a  great  cathedral  with  High  Mass 
and  children  playing  hide-and-seek  behind  the 
pillars ;  and  the  Mass  would  not  be  itself 
without  the  children.  That  is  the  mind  of 
Mozart  which  people  have  called  frivolous,  just 
because  in  his  heaven  there  is  room  for  every- 
thing except  the  vulgar  glory  of  Solomon  and 
cruelty  and  stupidity  and  ugliness.  There 
never  was  anything  in  art  more  profound  or 
beautiful  than  Sarostro's  initiation  music,  but 
it  is  not,  like  the  solemnities  of  the  half-serious, 
incongruous  with  the  twitterings  of  Papageno. 
Mozart's  religion  is  so  real  that  it  seems  to  be 
not  religion,  but  merely  beauty,  as  real  saints 
seem  to  be  not  good,  but  merely  charming. 
And  there  are  people  to  whom  his  beauty  does 
not  seem  to  be  art,  because  it  is  just  beauty; 
they  think  that  he  had  the  trick  of  it  and 
could  turn  it  on  as  he  chose ;  they  prefer  the 
creaking  of  effort  and  egotism.  His  gifts  are 
so  purely  gifts  and  so  lavish  that  they  seem  to 
be  cheap ;  and  The  Magic  Flute  is  an  absurdity 
which  he  wrote  in  a  hurry  to  please  the  crowd. 
We  can  hardly  expect  to  see  a  satisfying  per- 
formance of  it  on  the  stage  of  to-day,  but  we 
must  be  grateful  for  any  performance,  for  the 
life  of  the  music  is  in  it.  One  can  see  from  it 
what  The  Magic  Flute  might  be.     The  music 

91 


Essays  on  Art 

is  so  sung,  so  played  that  it  does  transfigure 
the  peculiar  theatrical  hideousness  of  our  time. 
Tamino  and  Panina  may  look  like  figures  out 
of  an  Academy  picti:re,  as  heroes  and  heroines 
of  opera  always  do.  They  may  wear  clothes 
that  belong  to  no  world  of  reality  or  art, 
clothes  that  suggest  the  posed  and  dressed-up 
model.  But  the  music  mitigates  even  these, 
and  it  helps  every  one  to  act,  or  rather  to 
forget  what  they  have  learnt  about  acting.  It 
evidently  brings  happiness  and  concord  to  those 
who  sing  it,  so  that  they  seem  to  be  taking 
part  in  a  religious  act  rather  than  in  an  act  of 
the  theatre.  One  feels  this  most  in  the  con- 
certed music,  when  the  same  wind  from  paradise 
seems  to  be  blowing  through  all  the  singers 
and  they  move  to  it  like  flowers,  in  spite  of 
their  absurd  clothes. 

But  what  is  needed  for  a  satisfying  per- 
formance is  a  world  congruous  to  the  eye  as 
well  as  to  the  ear ;  and  for  this  we  need  a 
break  with  all  our  theatrical  conventions. 
Sarostro,  for  instance,  lives  among  Egyptian 
scenery — very  likely  the  architecture  of  his 
temple  was  Egyptian  at  the  first  performance 
— but,  for  all  that,  this  Egyptian  world  does 
not  suit  the  music,  and  to  us  it  suggests  the 
miracles  of  the  Egyptian  Hall.  But  there  is 
92 


"The   Magic  Flute" 

one  world  which  would  perfectly  suit  the  music, 
a  world  in  which  it  could  pass  naturally  from 
absurdity  to  beauty,  and  in  which  all  the  figures 
could  be  harmonious  and  yet  distinct,  and  that 
is  the  Chinese  world  as  we  know  it  in  Chinese 
art.  For  in  that  there  is  something  fantastic 
yet  spiritual,  something  comic  but  beautiful,  a 
mixture  of  the  childish  and  the  sacred,  which 
might  say  to  the  eye  what  Mozart's  music  says 
to  the  ear.  Only  in  Chinese  art  could  Papageno 
be  a  saint ;  only  in  that  world,  which  ranges 
from  the  willow-pattern  plate  to  the  Rishi  in 
his  mystical  ecstasy  in  the  wilderness,  could  the 
soul  of  Mozart,  with  its  laughter  and  its  wisdom, 
be  at  home.  That  too  is  the  world  in  which 
flowers  and  all  animals  are  of  equal  import  with 
mankind ;  it  is  the  world  of  dragons  in  which 
the  serpent  of  the  first  act  would  not  seem  to 
be  made  of  pasteboard,  and  in  which  all  the 
magic  would  not  seem  to  be  mere  conjuring. 
In  that  world  one  might  have  beautiful  land- 
scapes and  beautiful  figures  to  suit  them. 
There  Sarostro  would  not  be  a  stage  magician, 
but  a  priest ;  from  Papageno  and  the  lovers  to 
him  would  be  only  the  change  from  Ming  to 
Sung,  which  would  seem  no  change  at  all. 
Chinese  art,  in  fact,  is  the  world  of  the  magic 
flute,  the  world   where   silver   bells   hang   on 

93 


Essays  on  Art 

every  flowering  tree  and  the  thickets  are  full 
of  enchanted  nightingales.  It  is  the  world  of 
imps  and  monsters,  and  yet  of  impassioned 
contemplation,  where  the  sage  sits  in  a  moonlit 
pavilion  and  smiles  like  a  lover,  and  where  the 
lovers  smile  like  sages ;  where  everything  is  to 
the  eye  what  the  music  of  Mozart  is  to  the  ear. 
In  the  Chinese  world  we  could  be  rid  of  all 
the  drawling  erotics  of  the  modern  theatre, 
we  could  give  up  the  orchid  for  the  lotus  and 
the  heavy  egotism  of  Europe  for  the  self- 
forgetful  gaiety  of  the  East.  It  may  be  only 
an  ideal  world,  empty  of  the  horrors  of  reality, 
but  it  is  one  which  the  art  of  China  makes 
real  to  us  and  with  which  we  are  familiar  in 
that  art ;  and  there  is  a  smiling  wisdom  in  it, 
there  is  a  gaiety  which  comes  from  conquest 
rather  than  refusal  of  reality,  just  like  the 
gaiety  and  wisdom  of  Mozarfs  music.  He 
knew  sorrow  well,  but  would  not  luxuriate  in 
it;  he  took  the  beauty  of  the  universe  more 
seriously  than  himself.  To  him  wickedness 
was  a  matter  of  imps  and  monsters  rather  than 
of  villains,  and  of  imps  and  monsters  that 
could  be  exorcized  by  music.  He  was  the 
Orpheus  of  the  world  who  might  tame  the 
beast  in  all  of  us  if  we  would  listen  to  him,  the 
wandering   minstrel  whom   the  world  left   to 

94 


"The  Magic  Flute" 

play  out  in  the  street.  And  yet  his  ultimate 
seriousness  and  the  last  secret  of  his  beauty  is 
pity,  not  for  himself  and  his  own  little  troubles, 
but  for  the  whole  bitter  earnestness  of  mortal 
children.  And  in  this  pity  he  seems  not  to 
weep  for  us,  still  less  for  himself,  but  to  tell  us 
to  dry  our  tears  and  be  good,  and  listen  to  his 
magic  flute.  That  is  what  he  would  have  told 
the  Prussians,  after  he  had  set  them  marching 
the  goose-step  backwards.  Even  they  would 
not  be  the  villains  of  a  tragedy  for  him,  but 
only  beasts  to  be  tamed  with  his  music  until 
they  should  be  fit  to  sing  their  own  bass  part 
in  the  last  chorus  of  reconciliation.  And  this 
pity  of  his  sounds  all  through  The  Magic  Flute 
and  gives  to  its  beauty  a  thrill  and  a  wonder 
far  beyond  what  any  fleshly  passion  can  give. 
Sarostro  is  a  priest,  not  a  magician,  because  there 
is  in  him  the  lovely  wisdom  of  pity,  because  he 
has  a  place  in  his  paradise  for  Papageno,  the 
child  of  nature,  where  he  shall  be  made  happy 
with  his  mate  Papagena.  There  is  a  moment 
when  Papageno  is  about  to  hang  himself 
because  there  is  no  one  to  love  him  ;  he  will 
hang  himself  in  Sarostro's  lonely  paradise. 
But  there  is  a  sly  laughter  in  the  music  which 
tells  us  that  he  will  be  interrupted  with  the 
rope   round   his   neck.     And    so    he    is,   and 

95 


Essays  on  Art 

Papagena  is  given  to  him,  and  the  paradise  is 
no  longer  lonely ;  and  the  two  sing  their  part 
in  the  chorus  of  reconciliation  at  the  end. 
And  we  are  sure  that  the  Queen  of  Night, 
and  the  ugly  negro  and  all  his  goose -stepping 
attendants,  are  not  punished.  They  have  been 
naughty  for  no  reason  that  anyone  can  discover, 
just  like  Prussians  and  other  human  beings ; 
and  now  the  magic  flute  triumphs  over  their 
naughtiness,  and  the  silver  bells  ring  from 
every  tree  and  the  enchanted  nightingales  sing 
in  all  the  thickets,  and  the  sages  and  the 
lovers  smile  like  children ;  and  the  laughter 
passes  naturally  into  the  divine  beauty  of 
Mozart's  religion,  which  is  solemn  because 
laughter  and  pity  are  reconciled  in  it,  not 
rejected  as  profane. 


96 


Process  or  Person?    <o       ^i^       ^       o* 

NEARLY  all  war  pictures  in  the  past 
have  been  merely  pictures  that  hap- 
pened to  represent  war.  Paolo  Uccello's  battle 
scenes  are  but  pretexts  for  his  peculiar  ver- 
sion of  the  visible  world.  They  might  as 
well  be  still  life  for  all  the  effect  the  subject 
has  had  upon  his  treatment  of  it.  Leonardo, 
in  his  lost  battle  picture,  was  no  doubt 
dramatic,  and  expressed  in  it  his  infinite 
curiosity ;  he  has  left  notes  about  the  manner 
in  which  fighting  men  and  horses  ought  to  be 
represented,  but  he  had  this  detached  curi- 
osity about  all  things.  Michelangelo's  battle 
picture,  also  lost,  expressed  his  interest  in  the 
nude  in  violent  action,  like  his  picture  of  the 
"  Last  Judgment."  Titian's  «  Battle  of  Cadore," 
which  we  know  from  the  copy  of  a  frag- 
ment of  it,  was  a  landscape  with  figures  in 
violent  action.  Tintoret's  battle  scenes  are 
parade  pictures.  Those  of  Rubens  are  like  his 
hunting  scenes  or  his  Bacchanals,  expressions 
of  his  own  overweening  energy.  In  none  of 
G  97 


Essays  on  Art 

these,  except  perhaps  in  Leonardo's,  was  there 
implied  any  criticism  of  war,  or  any  sense  that 
it  is  an  abnormal  activity  of  man.  The  men 
who  take  part  in  it  are  just  men  fighting ; 
they  are  not  men  seen  differently  because  they 
are  fighting,  or  in  any  way  robbed  of  their 
humanity  because  of  their  inhuman  business. 
As  for  Meissonier,  he  paints  a  battle  scene  just 
as  if  he  were  a  second-rate  Dutchman  painting 
a  genre  picture ;  and  most  other  modem 
military  painters  make  merely  a  patriotic 
appeal.  War  to  them  also  is  a  normal  occu- 
pation ;  and  they  paint  battle  pictures  as  they 
might  paint  sporting  pictures,  because  there  is 
a  public  that  likes  them. 

In  Mr.  Nevinson's  war  pictures  there  is 
expressed  a  modern  sense  of  war  as  an 
abnormal  occupation ;  and  this  sense  shows 
itself  in  the  very  method  of  the  artist.  He 
was  something  of  a  Cubist  before  the  war ;  but 
in  these  pictures  he  has  found  a  new  reason  for 
being  one  ;  for  his  cubist  method  does  express, 
in  the  most  direct  way,  his  sense  that  in  war 
man  behaves  like  a  machine  or  part  of  a 
machine,  that  war  is  a  process  in  which  man 
is  not  treated  as  a  human  being  but  as  an 
item  in  a  great  instrument  of  destruction,  in 
which  he  ceases  to  be  a  person  and  is  lost  in  a 
98 


Process  or  Person  ? 

process.  The  cubist  method,  with  its  repeti- 
tion and  sharp  distinction  of  planes,  expresses 
this  sense  of  mechanical  process  better  than 
any  other  way  of  representation.  Perhaps  it 
came  into  being  to  express  the  modern  sense  of 
process  as  the  ultimate  reality  of  all  things, 
even  of  life  and  growth.  This  is  the  age  of 
mechanism ;  and  machines  have  affected  even  our 
view  of  the  universe ;  we  are  overawed  by  our 
own  knowledge  and  inventions.  Samuel  Butler 
imagined  a  future  in  which  machines  would 
come  to  life  and  make  us  their  slaves ;  but  it 
is  not  so  much  that  machines  have  come  to  life 
as  that  we  ourselves  have  lost  the  pride  and 
sweetness  of  our  humanity;  not  that  the 
machines  seem  more  and  more  like  us,  but  that 
we  seem  more  and  more  like  the  machines. 
Everywhere  we  see  processes  to  which  we  are 
subject  and  of  which  our  humanity  is  the 
result,  though  in  the  past  we  have  harboured 
the  delusion  that  our  humanity  was  in  some 
way  independent  of  processes.  Now  that  de- 
lusion is  fading  away  from  us ;  and  it  fades 
away  most  of  all  in  war,  where  all  humanity 
is  evidently  dominated  by  the  struggle  for  life, 
and  is  but  a  part  of  it,  as  raindrops  are  part  of 
a  storm. 

It  is  this  sense  of  tyrannous  process  that  Mr. 

99 


Essays  on  Art 

Nevinson  expresses  in  his  battle  pictures,  with, 
we  suspect,  a  bitter  feeling  of  resentment 
against  it.  His  pictures  look  like  a  visible 
reductio  ad  ahsurdum  of  it  all.  That  is  how 
men  look,  he  seems  to  say,  when  they  are  fight- 
ing in  modem  war;  and,  being  men,  they 
ought  not  to  look  so.  That,  at  least,  is  the 
effect  the  pictures  produce  on  us.  They  are  a 
bitter  satire  on  all  the  modem  power  of  man 
and  the  uses  to  which  he  has  put  it.  He  has 
allowed  it  to  make  him  its  slave  and  to  set  him 
to  a  business  which  has  no  purpose  whatever, 
which  is  as  blind  as  the  process  of  the  universe 
seems  to  one  who  has  no  faith.  This  struggle 
for  life  might  just  as  well  be  called  a  struggle 
for  death.  It  is,  in  fact,  merely  a  struggle 
between  two  machines  intent  on  wrecking  each 
other ;  and  part  of  the  machines  are  the  bodies 
of  men,  which  behave  as  if  there  were  no  souls 
in  them,  as  if  there  were  not  even  life,  but 
merely  energy  ;  so  that  they  collide  and  destroy 
each  other  like  masses  of  matter  in  space. 
Nothing  can  be  said  of  them  except  that  they 
obey  certain  laws ;  we  call  their  obedience 
discipline,  but  it  is  only  the  discipline  of  things 
subject  to  a  process. 

Now  it  is  the  sense  of  process,  as  the  ulti- 
mate reality  in  the  universe,  which   has  pro- 
100 


Process  or  Person  ? 

duced  war  against  the  conscience  of  mankind, 
and  even  of  many  Germans.  Conscience  was 
powerless  to  prevent  it  because  conscience  had 
ceased  to  believe  in  its  own  power,  had  come 
to  think  of  itself  as  a  vain  and  inexplicable 
rebellion  against  the  nature  of  things.  This 
rebellion  we  call  sentimentality,  meaning 
thereby  that  it  is  really  not  even  moral ;  for 
true  morality  would  recognize  the  process  to 
which  the  nature  of  man  is  subject,  of  which 
that  nature  is  itself  a  part ;  and  would  cure 
man  of  his  futile  rebellions  so  that  he  should 
not  suffer  needlessly  from  them.  It  would 
cure  man  of  pity,  because  it  is  through  pity 
that  he  suffers.  He  is  a  machine,  and,  if  he  is 
a  conscious  machine,  he  should  be  conscious  of 
the  fact  that  he  is  one.  Such  is  the  belief  that 
has  been  growing  upon  us  for  fifty  years  or 
more  with  many  strange  effects.  It  has  not 
destroyed  our  sense  of  pity,  but  has  confused 
and  exasperated  it.  We  pity  and  love  still, 
but  with  desperation,  not  like  Christians 
assured  that  these  things  are  according  to  the 
order  of  the  universe,  but  fearing  that  they  are 
wilful  exceptions  to  that  order,  costly  luxuries 
that  we  indulge  in  at  our  own  peril.  We 
seem  to  ourselves  lonely  in  our  pity  and 
love ;  the  supreme  process  knows  nothing 
lOI 


.    Essays  on  Art 

of    them ;    the   God,   who   is   love,   does   not 
exist. 

In  the  past  wars  have  happened  with  the 
consent  of  mankind;  but  this  war  did  not 
happen  so.  Even  in  Germany  there  was 
something  hysterical  in  the  praise  of  war,  as  if 
it  were  the  worship  of  an  idol  both  hated  and 
feared.  We  must  praise  war,  the  German 
worehippers  of  force  seem  to  say,  so  that  we 
may  survive.  We  must  forgo  the  past  hopes 
of  man  so  that  we  may  find  something  real  to 
hope  for.  We  must  habituate  ourselves  to 
the  universe  as  it  is,  and  break  ourselves  and 
all  mankind  in  to  the  bitter  truth.  They 
praised  war  as  we  used  in  England  to  praise 
industry.  Labour,  we  beheved,  when  all  the 
labour  of  the  poor  had  been  made  joyless  by 
the  industrial  revolution,  was  the  result  of  the 
curse  laid  upon  man  by  God.  Therefore,  man 
must  labour  without  joy  and  never  dream  of 
happy  work.  And  so  now  the  very  worshippers 
of  war  believe  that  it  is  a  curse  laid  upon  man 
by  the  nature  of  things.  They  may  not  believe 
in  the  fall  of  man,  but  they  do  believe  that  he 
can  never  rise,  since  he  is  himself  part  of  a 
process  which  is  always  war  ;  and,  if  he  tries  to 
escape  from  it,  he  will  become  extinct.  So 
they  exhort  us  to  consent  to  that  process  even 
102 


Process  or  Person  ? 

with  our  conscience ;  the  more  completely  we 
consent  to  it,  the  more  we  shall  succeed  in  it. 
But  all  the  while  they  are  doing  violence  to  our 
natures  and  to  their  own.  They  try  to  think 
like  machines,  like  the  slaves  of  a  process ;  but 
thought  itself  is  inconsistent  with  their  effort ; 
their  very  praises  of  the  heroism  of  their 
victims  are  inconsistent  with  it.  There  is 
a  gaping  incongruity  between  the  obsolete 
German  romanticism  and  the  new  German 
atheism  which  exploited  it,  between  their  talk 
about  Siegfried  and  their  talk  about  the 
struggle  for  life.  And  there  is  the  same 
incongruity  between  the  cubist  effort  to  see  the 
visible  world  as  a  mechanical  process  and  art 
itself.  The  cubist  seems  to  force  himself  with 
a  savage  irony  into  this  caricature  of  nature ; 
we  have  emptied  reality  of  its  content  in  our 
thought  and  he  will  empty  it  of  its  content  to 
our  eyes ;  that  is  not  how  we  really  see  things, 
but  it  is  how  we  ought  to  see  them  if  what 
we  believe  about  the  nature  of  things  is  true. 
This  irony  we  find  in  Mr.  Nevinson's  pictures 
of  the  war,  whether  it  be  a  despairing  irony  or 
the  rebellion  of  an  unshaken  faith.  He  has 
emptied  man  of  his  content,  just  as  the 
Prussian  drill  sergeant  would  empty  him  of  his 
content  for  the  purposes  of  war;  and  only  a 
103 


Essays  on  Art 

Prussian  drill  sergeant  could   consent  to  this 
version  of  man  with  any  joy. 

That,  perhaps,  is  how  we  shall  all  come  to 
see  everything  if  we  continue  for  some  centuries 
to  believe  that  process  and  not  person  is  the 
ultimate  reality.     Emptying   ourselves   of  all 
our  content  in  thought,  we  shall  at  last  empty 
ourselves  of  all  content   in   reality ;   we  shall 
become  what  now  we  fear  we  are,  and  our  very 
senses  will  be  obedient  to  our   unfaith.     For 
unfaith  is  the  belief  in  process  ;  and  faith  is  the 
belief  in   person.     It  is   the  belief  in  process 
that    makes     men     sacrifice     other    men    in 
thousands   to   some   idol;   it   is   the  belief  in 
person   that   makes   them    refuse   to   sacrifice 
anyone  but  themselves ;    and   they  are  afraid 
when  they  sacrifice  others,  but  confident  when 
they  sacrifice  themselves.      Ultimately  process 
has  no  value  and  can  have  no  value  for  us.     It 
is   merely  what  exists  or  what  we  believe  to 
exist,  and   our   effort  to  value   it  is  only  the 
obsequiousness  of  the  slave  to  the  power  that 
he  fears.     All  our  values  come  from  the  sense 
of  person  as  more  real  than  process.     We  will 
not  do  wrong  to  a  man  because  he  is  a  man ; 
if  he  is  to  us  only  part  of  a  process,  we  cannot 
value  him  and  we  can  do  what  we  will  to  him 
without    any   sense    of  wrong.     All   the   old 
104 


Process  or  Person  ? 

cruelties  and  iniquities  of  the  world  arose  out 
of  a  belief  in  process  and  a  fear  of  it.     It  is 
not   a   modern   scientific    discovery,   but    the 
oldest    and    darkest     superstition     that    has 
oppressed  the  mind  of  man.     To  all  religious 
persecutors  salvation  was  a  process,  like  that 
struggle  for  life  which  is  the  modem  form  of 
the  struggle  for  salvation  to  the  superstitious. 
And  because  salvation  was   a  process   human 
beings  were  sacrificed  to  it.     It  did  not  matter 
how  they  were  tortured,  provided  this  abstract 
process  was  maintained.     So  it  does  not  matter 
now  how  they  are  slaughtered,  provided   the 
abstract  process  of  the  struggle  for  life  is  main- 
tained.    To  the  German  this  war  was  part  of  a 
process,  the  historical  process  of  the  triumph  of 
Germany,  and  it   did   not  matter  how  many 
Germans  were  killed  in  furthering  it.     If  they 
were    all    killed   Germany   would    still    have 
asserted   her    faithless   faith    in   process    and 
would  have  reduced  it  to  a  glorious  absurdity. 
So,  if  we  fought  for  anything  beyond  our- 
selves, we   fought  for  the  belief  in  person  as 
against  the  belief  in  process.     Indeed,  it  is  the 
chief  glory  of  England,  among  her  many  follies 
and   crimes,  that  she  has   always   believed  in 
person   rather   than   in   process ;   and  that   is 
what  we  mean  when  we  say  that  we  refuse  to 
105 


Essays  on  Art 

sacrifice  facts  to  theories.  Men  themselves  are 
to  us  facts,  and  we  distrust  theories  that 
empty  them  of  content.  If  we  act  like  brutes, 
we  would  rather  do  so  because  the  brute  has 
mastered  us  for  the  moment  than  because  we 
believe  that  humanity  is  inconsistent  with  the 
process  that  dominates  the  world.  We  our- 
selves had  rather  be  inconsistent  than  empty 
ourselves  of  all  reality  for  the  sake  of  a  theory. 
And  there  is  an  intellectual  as  well  as  a  moral 
basis  to  this  inconsistency  of  ours.  For  if  you 
believe  that  person,  not  process,  is  the  ulti- 
mate reality,  you  must  offer  some  defiance  to 
the  material  facts  of  life.  There  is  evidently 
a  conflict  between  person  and  process ;  and  in 
that  conflict  the  process,  which  you  perceive 
with  your  intelligence,  will  be  less  real  to  you 
than  the  person  of  whom  you  are  aware  with 
all  your  faculties.  So  you  will  trust  in  this 
union  of  all  the  faculties  rather  than  in  the 
exercise  of  the  pure  intelligence;  for  to  you 
the  pure  intelligence  will  be  part  of  the  person 
and  will  share  in  the  person's  universal  imper- 
fection. In  fact  it  will  not  be  pure  intelligence 
at  all,  but  rather  a  faculty  that  may  be 
obsequious  to  all  the  lower  passions.  Nothing 
will  free  you  from  them,  except  the  respect  for 
persons,  except,  in  fact,  loving  your  neighbour 
I06 


Process  or  Person  ? 

as  yourself.  There  is  no  way  to  consistency 
but  through  that,  and  no  way  to  the  exercise  of 
the  pure  intelligence.  Never  sacrifice  a  person 
to  a  process  and  you  will  never  sacrifice  a 
person  to  your  own  lower  passions.  But,  if  you 
believe  in  process  rather  than  in  person,  you 
will  see  your  passions  as  part  of  the  process  and 
glorify  them  when  you  think  you  are  glorifying 
the  nature  of  the  universe. 

Cubism  and  all  those  new  methods  of  art 
which  subject  facts  to  the  tyranny  of  a  process 
may  be  good  satire,  but  they  will  never,  I 
think,  produce  an  independent  beauty  of  their 
own.  Like  all  satire,  they  are  parasitic  upon 
past  art,  negative  and  rebellious.  They  tell 
us  what  the  universe  may  look  like  to  us  if 
we  lose  all  faith  in  ourselves  and  each  other ; 
and,  when  they  are  the  result  of  a  desperate 
effort  to  see  the  universe  so,  they  are  uncon- 
scious satire.  The  complete,  convinced  cubist 
reduces  his  own  method,  his  own  beliefs,  his 
own  state  of  mind,  to  an  absurdity.  The  more 
sincere  he  is,  the  more  complete  is  the  reduction. 
For  he,  rejecting  all  that  has  been  the  subject- 
matter  of  painting  in  the  past,  all  the  human 
values  and  the  complexes  of  association  which 
have  invested  the  visible  world  with  beauty  for 
men,  proves  to  us  in  his  tortured  diagrams 
107 


Essays  on  Art 

that  he  has  found  nothing  to  take  their  place, 
He  gives  us  a  Chinuera  hombinans  in  vacuo,  that 
vacuum  which  the  universe  is  to  the  human 
spirit  when  it  denies  itself.  He  tries  to  make 
art,  having  cut  himself  off  from  all  the  experi- 
ence and  belief  that  produce  art.  For  art 
springs  always  out  of  a  supreme  value  for  the 
personal  and  is  an  expression  of  that  value.  It 
is  an  effort,  no  matter  in  what  medium,  to 
find  the  personal  in  all  things,  to  see  trees  as 
men  walking ;  and  the  new  abstract  methods 
in  painting  reverse  this  process,  they  empty 
all  things,  even  men,  of  personality  and  subject 
them  to  a  process  invented  by  the  artist,  which 
expresses,  if  it  expresses  anything,  his  own  loss 
of  personal  values  and  nothing  else.  The 
result  may  be  ingenious,  it  may  still  have  a 
kind  of  beauty  remembered  from  the  great 
design  of  past  art ;  but  it  will  lead  nowhere, 
since  it  is  cut  off  from  the  very  experience,  the 
passionate  personal  interest  in  people  and 
things,  which  gave  design  to  the  great  art  of 
the  past.  It  is  at  best  satirical,  at  worst 
parasitic,  using  up  all  devices  of  design  and 
turning  from  one  to  another  in  a  restless  ennui 
which  of  itself  can  give  no  enrichment.  It 
may  have  its  uses,  since  it  insists  upon  the 
supreme  importance  of  design  and  provides  a 
io8 


Process  or  Person  ? 

new  method  for  the  expression  of  three  dimen- 
sions ;  but  this  method  will  be  barren  unless 
those  who  practise  it  enrich  it  with  their  own 
observation  and  delight.  Already  some  of  them 
seem  to  be  weary  of  the  barrenness  of  pure 
abstraction  ;  they  see  that  any  fool  can  hide 
his  own  commonplace  in  cubism  as  an  ostrich 
hides  its  head  in  the  sand ;  but  we  would 
rather  have  honest  chocolate-box  ladies  than 
the  kaleidoscopic  but  betraying  chocolate-box 
fragments  of  the  futurist. 


109 


The  Artist  and  the  Tradesman     -o       •^o 

THE  Exhibition  of  the  Arts  and  Crafts 
at  Burlington  House  was  an  acknow- 
ledgment of  the  fact  that  there  are  other  arts 
besides  those  of  painting,  sculpture,  and  archi- 
tecture, or  rather  perhaps  that  the  arts  sub- 
sidiary to  architecture  are  arts  and  not  merely 
commercial  activities.  Burlington  House 
would  protest,  of  course,  that  it  is  not  a  shop ; 
but  now  at  last  objects  are  to  be  shown  in  it 
which  the  great  mass  of  the  public  expects  to 
see  only  in  shops  and  expects  to  be  produced 
merely  to  sell.  We  remember  how  Lord 
Grimthorpe  called  Morris  a  poetic  upholsterer. 
He  meant  there  was  something  incongruous  in 
the  combination  of  an  upholsterer  and  a  poet ; 
he  would  have  seen  nothing  incongruous  in 
the  combination  of  a  poet  and  a  painter, 
because  he  would  have  called  a  painter  an 
artist ;  but  an  upholsterer  was  to  him  merely 
a  tradesman,  and  tradesmen  are  not  expected 
to  write  poetry.  Their  business  is  to  sell 
things  and  to  make  objects  for  sale. 
IIO 


The  Artist  and  the  Tradesman 

In  that  respect  he  thought  like  the  mass  of 
the  public  now.  For  them  the  painter  has 
some  prestige,  because  he  is  supposed  not  to  be 
a  tradesman,  not  to  paint  his  pictures  merely 
so  that  he  may  sell  them.  He  has  to  live  by 
his  art,  of  course,  but  he  practises  it  also 
because  he  enjoys  it ;  and,  if  he  is  an  artist,  he 
will  not  paint  bad  pictures  merely  because 
they  are  what  the  pubHc  wants.  But  it  is  the 
business  of  those  who  make  furniture  and  such 
things  to  produce  what  the  public  wants.  No 
one  would  blame  them  for  producing  what 
they  do  not  like  themselves,  any  more  than 
one  would  blame  a  pill-maker  for  producing 
pills  that  he  would  not  swallow  himself.  The 
pill-maker  and  the  furniture-maker  are  both 
tradesmen  producing  objects  in  answer  to  a 
demand.  They  have  no  prestige  and  no  con- 
science is  expected  of  them. 

Now  in  Italy  in  the  fifteenth  century  this 
distinction  between  the  artist  and  the  trades- 
man did  not  exist.  The  painter  was  a  trades- 
man ;  he  kept  a  shop  and  he  had  none  of  that 
peculiar  prestige  which  he  possesses  now.  But 
of  the  tradesman  more  was  expected  than  is 
expected  now ;  for  instance,  good  workman- 
ship and  material  were  expected  of  him  and 
also  good  design.  He  did  not  produce  articles 
III 


Essays  on  Art 

merely  to  sell,  whether  they  were  pictures  or 
wedding-chests  or  jewelry  or  pots  and  pans. 
He  made  all  these  other  things  just  as  he 
made  pictures,  with  some  pleasure  and  con- 
science in  his  own  work ;  and  it  was  the  best 
craftsman  who  became  a  painter  or  sculptor, 
merely  because  those  were  the  most  difficult 
crafts.  Now  it  is  the  gentleman  with  artistic 
faculty  who  becomes  a  painter ;  the  poor  man, 
however  much  of  that  faculty  he  possesses, 
remains  a  workman  without  any  artistic 
prestige  and  without  any  temptation  to  con- 
sider the  quality  of  his  work  or  to  take  any 
pleasure  in  it.  This  is  a  commonplace,  no 
doubt ;  but  it  remains  a  fact,  however  often 
it  may  have  been  repeated,  and  a  social  fact 
with  a  constant  evil  effect  upon  all  the  arts. 
Because  the  painter  is  supposed  to  be  an  artist 
and  nothing  else  and  the  craftsman  a  trades- 
man and  nothing  else,  we  do  not  expect  the 
virtues  of  the  craftsman  from  the  painter  nor 
the  virtues  of  the  artist  from  the  craftsman. 
For  us  there  is  nothing  but  mystery  in  the 
work  of  the  artist  and  no  mystery  at  all  in 
the  work  of  the  craftsman.  The  painter  can 
be  as  silly  as  he  likes,  and  we  do  not  laugh  at 
him,  if  we  are  persons  of  culture,  because  his 
art  is  a  sacred  mystery.  But,  as  for  the  crafts- 
112 


The  Artist  and  the  Tradesman 

man,  there  is  nothing  sacred  about  his  work. 
It  is  sold  in  a  shop  and  made  to  be  sold ;  and 
all  we  expect  of  it  is  that  it  shall  be  in  the 
fashion,  which  means  that  it  shall  be  what  the 
commercial  traveller  thinks  he  can  sell.  There 
are,  of  course,  a  few  craftsman  who  are  thought 
of  as  artists,  and  their  work  at  once  becomes  a 
sacred  mystery,  like  pictures.  They  too  have 
a  right  to  be  as  silly  as  they  like ;  and  some 
people  will  buy  their  work,  however  siUy  it 
may  be,  as  they  would  buy  pictures — that  is 
to  say,  for  the  good  of  their  souls  and  not 
because  they  like  it. 

How  are  we  to  get  rid  of  this  distinction 
we  have  made  between  the  artist  and  the 
tradesman?  How  are  we  to  recover  for  the 
artist  the  virtues  of  the  craftsman  and  for  the 
craftsman  the  virtues  of  the  artist.?  At 
present  we  get  from  neither  what  we  really 
like.  Art  remains  to  us  a  painful  mystery  ; 
most  of  us  would  define  it,  if  we  were  honest, 
as  that  which  human  beings  buy  because  they 
do  not  like  it.  While,  as  for  objects  of  use, 
they  are  bought  mainly  because  they  are  sold  ; 
they  are  forced  upon  us  as  a  conjurer  forces 
a  card.  We  think  we  like  them  while  they 
remain  the  fashion;  but  soon  they  are  like 
women's  clothes  of  two  years  ago,  if  they  last 
H  113 


Essays  on  Art 

long  enough  to  be  outmoded.  It  is  vain  for  us 
to  reproach  either  the  artist  or  the  tradesman. 
The  fault  is  in  ourselves ;  we  have  as  a  whole 
society  yielded  to  the  most  subtle  temptation 
of  Satan.  We  have  lost  the  power  of  know- 
ing what  we  like — that  is  to  say,  the  power 
of  loving.  We  value  nothing  for  itself,  but 
everything  for  its  associations.  The  man  of 
culture  buys  a  picture,  not  because  he  likes  it, 
but  because  he  thinks  it  is  art ;  at  most  what 
he  enjoys  is  not  the  picture  itself  but  the 
thought  that  he  is  cultured  enough  to  enjoy  it. 
That  thought  comes  between  him  and  the 
picture,  and  makes  it  impossible  for  him  to  ex- 
perience the  picture  at  all.  And  so  he  is 
ready  to  accept  anything  that  the  painter 
chooses  to  give  him,  if  only  he  beHeves  the 
painter  to  be  a  real  artist.  This  is  bad  for  the 
painter,  who  has  every  temptation  to  become 
a  charlatan,  and  to  think  of  his  art  as  a  sacred 
mystery  which  no  one  can  understand  but 
himself  and  a  few  other  painters  of  his  own 
sect.  But  in  this  matter  the  man  of  culture 
is  just  like  the  vulgar  herd,  as  he  would  call 
them.  Their  attitude  to  the  arts  of  use  is  the 
same  as  his  attitude  to  pictures.  They  do  not 
buy  furniture  or  china  because  they  like  them, 
but  because  the  shopman  persuades  them  that 
114 


The  Artist  and  the  Tradesman 

what  they  buy  is  the  fashion.  Or  perhaps 
they  recognize  it  themselves  as  the  fashion  and 
therefore  instantly  believe  that  they  like  it. 
In  both  cases  the  buyer  is  hypnotized  ;  he  has 
lost  the  faculty  of  finding  out  for  himself  what 
he  really  likes,  and  his  mind,  being  empty  of 
real  affection,  is  open  to  the  seven  devils  of 
suggestion.  He  cannot  enjoy  directly  any 
beautiful  thing,  all  he  can  enjoy  is  the  belief 
that  he  is  enjoying  it ;  and  he  can  harbour 
this  belief  about  any  nonsense  or  trash. 

It  is  a  very  curious  disease  that  has  become 
endemic  in  the  whole  of  Europe.  People 
impute  it  to  machinery,  but  unjustly.  There 
are  objects  made  by  machinery,  such  as  motor- 
cars, which  have  real  beauty  of  design ;  and 
people  do  genuinely  and  unconsciously  enjoy 
this  beauty,  just  because  they  never  think  of  it 
as  beauty.  They  like  the  look  of  a  car  because 
they  can  see  that  it  is  well  made  for  its  purpose. 
If  only  they  would  like  the  look  of  any  object 
of  use  for  the  same  reason,  the  arts  of  use 
would  once  again  begin  to  flourish  among  us. 
But  when  once  we  ask  ourselves  whether  any 
thing  is  beautiful,  we  become  incapable  of 
knowing  our  real  feelings  about  it.  Any 
tradesman  or  artist  can  persuade  us  that  we 
think  it  beautiful  when  we  do  nothing  of  the 

115 


Essays  on  Art 

kind.  We  are  all  like  the  crowd  who  admired 
the  Emperor's  clothes;  and  there  is  no  child 
to  tell  us  that  the  Emperor  has  no  clothes  on 
at  all.  We  are  not  so  with  human  beings; 
we  cannot  be  persuaded  that  we  like  a  man 
when  really  we  dislike  him ;  if  we  could,  our 
whole  society  would  soon  dissolve  in  a  moral 
anarchy.  But  with  regard  to  the  works  of 
man,  or  that  part  of  them  which  is  supposed 
to  aim  at  beauty,  we  are  in  a  state  of  aesthetic 
anarchy,  because  there  is  a  whole  vast  con- 
spiracy, itself  unconscious  for  the  most  part,  to 
persuade  us  that  we  like  what  no  human  being 
out  of  a  madhouse  could  like. 

So  the  real  problem  for  us  is  to  discover, 
not  merely  in  pictures,  but  in  all  things  that 
are  supposed  to  have  beauty,  what  we  really 
do  like.  And  we  can  best  do  that,  perhaps,  if 
we  dismiss  the  notions  of  art  and  beauty  for  a 
time  from  our  minds ;  not  because  art  and 
beauty  do  not  exist,  but  because  our  notions 
of  them  are  wrong  and  misleading.  The  very 
words  intimidate  us,  as  people  used  to  be 
intimidated  by  the  jargon  of  pietistic  religion, 
so  that  they  would  believe  that  a  very  un- 
pleasant person  was  a  saint.  When  once  we 
look  for  beauty  in  anything,  we  look  no  longer 
for  good  design,  good  workmanship,  or  good 
Ii6 


The  Artist  and  the  Tradesman 

material.  It  is  because  we  do  not  look  for 
beauty  in  motor-cars  that  we  enjoy  the  ex- 
cellence of  their  design,  workmanship,  and 
material,  which  is  beauty,  if  only  we  knew  it. 
Beauty,  in  fact,  is  a  symptom  of  success  in 
things  made  by  man,  not  of  success  in  selling, 
but  of  success  in  making.  If  an  object  made 
by  man  gives  us  pleasure  in  itself,  then  it  has 
beauty ;  if  we  got  pleasure  only  from  the  belief 
that  in  it  we  are  enjoying  what  we  ought  to 
enjoy,  then  very  likely  it  is  as  naked  of  beauty 
as  the  Emperor  was  of  clothes.  The  great 
mass  of  people  now  have  a  belief  that  orna- 
ment is  necessarily  beauty,  that,  without  it, 
nothing  can  be  beautiful.  But  ornament  is 
often  only  added  ugliness,  like  a  wen  on  a 
man's  face.  It  is  always  added  ugliness  when 
it  is  machine-made,  and  when  it  is  put  on  to 
hide  cheapness  of  material  and  faults  of  design 
and  workmanship.  Unfortunately,  it  does  hide 
these  things  from  us ;  we  accept  ornament  as 
a  substitute  for  that  beauty  which  can  only 
come  of  good  design,  material,  and  workman- 
ship ;  and  we  do  not  recognize  these  things 
when  we  see  them,  except  in  objects  like 
motor-cars,  which  we  prefer  plain  because  we 
do  unconsciously  enjoy  their  real  beauty. 

So,  in  the  matter  of  ornament,  we  need  to 
117 


Essays  on  Art 

make  a  self-denying  ordinance;  not  because 
ornament  is  necessarily  bad — it  is  the  natural 
expression  of  the  artist's  superfluous  energy 
and  delight — but  because  we  ourselves  cannot 
be  trusted  with  ornament,  as  a  drunkard  cannot 
be  trusted  with  strong  drink.  We  must  learn 
to  see  things  plain  before  we  can  see  them  at 
all,  or  enjoy  them  for  their  own  real  qualities 
and  not  for  what  we  think  we  see  in  them.  A 
man  whose  taste  is  for  bad  poetry  can  only 
improve  it  by  reading  good,  plain  prose.  He 
must  become  rational  before  he  can  enjoy  the 
real  beauties  of  literature.  And  so  we  need 
to  become  rational  before  we  can  enjoy  art, 
whether  in  pictures  or  in  objects  of  use.  The 
unreason  of  our  painting  has  the  same  cause 
as  the  unreason  of  our  objects  of  use  ;  and  the 
cause  is  in  us,  not  in  the  artist.  We  think  of 
taste  as  something  in  its  nature  irrational.  It 
is  no  more  so  than  conscience  is.  Indeed,  there 
is  conscience  in  all  good  taste  as  in  all  the 
good  workmanship  that  pleases  it.  But  where 
the  public  has  not  this  conscience,  the  artist 
will  not  possess  it  either.  At  best  he  will  have 
only  what  he  calls  his  artistic  conscience — that 
is  to  say,  a  determination  to  follow  his  own 
whims  rather  than  the  taste  of  the  public. 
But  where  the  public  knows  what  it  likes,  and 
Ii8 


The  Artist  and  the  Tradesman 

the  artist  makes  what  he  likes,  there  is  more 
than  a  chance  that  both  will  like  the  same 
thing,  as  they  have  in  the  great  ages  of  art. 
For  a  real  liking  must  be  a  liking  for  some- 
thing good.  It  is  Satan  who  persuades  us 
that  we  like  what  is  bad  by  filling  our  mind 
with  sham  likings,  which  are  always  really  the 
expression  of  our  egotism  disguised. 


119 


Professionalism  in  Art       .    «o       o       ^ 

PROFESSIONALISM  is  a  dull,  ugly  word; 
but  it  means  dull,  ugly  things,  a  perver- 
sion of  the  higher  activities  of  man,  of  art, 
literature,  religion,  philosophy ;  and  a  perver- 
sion to  which  we  are  all  apt  to  be  blind.  We 
know  that  in  these  activities  specialization  is 
a  condition  of  excellence.  As  Keats  said  to 
Shelley,  in  art  it  is  necessary  to  serve  both  God 
and  Mammon ;  and  as  Samuel  Butler  said, 
"  That  is  not  easy,  but  then  nothing  that  is 
really  worth  doing  ever  is  easy.''  The  poet 
may  be  born,  not  made ;  but  no  man  can  start 
writing  poetry  as  if  it  had  never  been  written 
before.  In  every  art  there  is  a  medium,  and 
the  poet,  like  all  other  artists,  learns  from  the 
poets  of  the  past  how  to  use  his  medium. 
Often  he  does  this  unconsciously  by  reading 
them  for  delight.  He  first  becomes  a  poet 
because  he  loves  the  poetry  of  others.  And 
the  painter  becomes  a  painter  because  he  loves 
the  pictures  of  others.     Each  of  them  is  apt  to 

begin — 

As  if  his  whole  vocation 
Were  endless  imitation. 

I20 


Professionalism  in  Art 

So  the  artist  insists  to  himself  upon  the  value 
of  hard  work.  He  is  impatient  of  all  the  talk 
about  inspiration  ;  for  he  knows  that,  though 
nothing  can  be  done  witkout  it,  it  comes  only 
with  command  of  the  medium.  And  this  com- 
mand, like  all  craftsmanship,  is  traditional, 
handed  down  from  one  generation  to  another. 
Any  kind  of  expression  in  this  imperfect  world 
is  as  difficult  as  virtue  itself.  For  expression, 
like  virtue,  is  a  kind  of  transcendence.  In  it 
the  natural  man  rises  above  his  animal  functions, 
above  living  so  that  he  may  continue  to  live ; 
he  triumphs  over  those  animal  functions  which 
hold  him  down  to  the  earth  as  incessantly  as 
the  attraction  of  gravity  itself.  But,  like  the 
airman,  he  can  triumph  only  by  material  means, 
and  by  means  gradually  perfected  in  the  practice 
of  others.  Yet  there  is  always  this  difference, 
that  in  mechanics  anyone  can  learn  to  make  use 
of  an  invention  ;  but  in  the  higher  activities, 
invention,  if  it  becomes  mechanical,  destroys  the 
activity  itself,  even  in  the  original  inventor. 
The  medium  is  always  a  medium,  not  merely  a 
material ;  and  if  it  becomes  merely  a  material 
to  be  manipulated,  it  ceases  to  be  a  medium. 

Now  professionalism  is  the  result  of  a  false 
analogy  between  mechanical  invention  and  the 
higher   activities.     It    happens   whenever   the 

121 


Essays  on  Art 

medium  is  regarded  merely  as  material  to  be 
manipulated,  when  the  artist  thinks  that  he 
can  learn  to  fly  by  mastering  some  other  artist's 
machine,  when  his  art  is  to  him  a  matter  of 
invention  gradually  perfected  and  necessarily 
progressing  through  the  advance  of  knowledge 
and  skill.  One  often  finds  this  false  analogy 
in  books  about  the  history  of  the  arts,  especi- 
ally of  painting  and  music.  It  is  assumed, 
for  instance,  that  Italian  painting  progressed 
mechanically  from  Giotto  to  Titian,  that 
Titian  had  a  greater  power  of  expression  than 
Giotto  because  he  had  command  of  a  number 
of  inventions  in  anatomy  and  perspective  and 
the  like  that  were  unknown  to  Giotto.  So  we 
have  histories  of  the  development  of  the  sym- 
phony, in  which  Haydn,  Mozart,  Beethoven 
are  treated  as  if  they  were  mechanical  inventors 
each  profiting  by  the  discoveries  of  his  pre- 
decessors. Beethoven  was  the  greatest  of  the 
three  because  he  had  the  luck  to  be  bom  last, 
and  Beethoven's  earliest  symphonies  are  neces- 
sarily better  than  Mozart's  latest  because  they 
were  composed  later.  But  in  such  histories 
there  always  comes  a  point  at  which  artists 
cease  to  profit  by  the  inventions  of  their 
predecessors.  After  Michelangelo,  perhaps 
after  Beethoven,  is  the  decadence.  Then  sud- 
122 


Professionalism  in  Art 

denly  there  is  talk  of  inspiration,  or  the  lack 
of  it.  Mere  imitators  appear,  and  the  historian 
who  reviles  them  does  not  see  that  they  have 
only  practised,  and  refuted,  his  theory  of  art. 
They  also  have  had  the  luck  to  be  born  later ; 
but  it  has  been  bad  luck,  not  good,  for 
them,  because  to  them  their  art  has  been  all 
a  matter  of  mechanical  invention,  of  pro- 
fessionalism. 

The  worst  of  it  is  that  the  greatest  artists 
are  apt  themselves  to  fall  in  love  with  their 
own  inventions,  not  to  see  that  they  are 
mechanical  inventions  because  they  them- 
selves have  discovered  them.  Michelangelo 
in  his  "  Last  Judgment "  is  very  professional ; 
Titian  was  professional  through  all  his  middle 
age ;  Tintoret  was  professional  whenever  he 
was  bored  with  his  work,  which  happened 
often ;  Shakespeare,  whenever  he  was  lazy, 
which  was  not  seldom.  Beethoven,  we  now  be- 
gin to  see,  could  be  very  earnestly  professional ; 
and  as  for  Milton — consider  this  end  of  the 
last  speech  of  Manoah,  in  Samson  Agonistes, 
where  we  expect  a  simple  cadence : — 

The  virgins  also  shall  on  feastful  days 
Visit  his  tomb  with  flowers,  only  bewailing 
His  lot  unfortunate  in  nuptial  choice, 
From  whence  captivity  and  loss  of  eyes. 
133 


Essays  on  Art 

Milton  was  tempted  into  the  jargon  of  these  last 
two  lines,  which  are  like  a  bad  translation  of  a 
Greek  play,  by  professionalism.  He  was  trying 
to  make  his  poetry  as  much  unlike  ordinary 
speech  as  he  could ;  he  was  for  the  moment  a 
slave  to  a  tradition,  and  none  the  less  a  slave 
because  it  was  the  tradition  of  his  own  past. 

Professionalism  is  a  device  for  making  ex- 
pression easy ;  and  it  is  one  used  by  the 
greatest  artists  sometimes  because  their  business 
is  to  be  always  expressing  themselves,  and  even 
they  have  not  always  something  to  express. 
But  expression  is  so  difficult,  even  for  those 
who  have  something  to  express,  that  they 
must  be  always  practising  it  if  they  are  ever 
to  succeed  in  it.  Wordsworth,  for  instance, 
was  a  professed  enemy  of  professionalism  in 
poetry ;  yet  he,  too,  was  for  ever  writing  verses*' 
It  was  a  hobby  with  him  as  well  as  an  art ;  and 
his  professionalism  was  merely  less  accomplished 
than  that  of  Milton  or  Spenser : — 

Fair  Ellen  Inrwin,  when  she  sate 
Upon  the  Braes  of  Kirtle, 
Was  lovely  as  a  Grecian  maid 
Adorned  with  wreaths  of  myrtle. 

Why  adorned  with  wreaths  of  myrtle  ?     Words- 
worth himself  tells  us.     His  subject  had  already 
been  treated  in  Scotch  poems  "  in  simple  ballad 
124 


Professionalism  in  Art 

strain,"  so,  he  says,  "  at  the  outset  I  threw  out 
a  classical  image  to  prepare  the  reader  for  the 
style  in  which  I  meant  to  treat  the  story,  and 
so  to  preclude  all  comparison."  No  one,  whose 
object  was  just  to  tell  the  story,  would  compare 
Ellen  with  a  Grecian  maid  and  her  wreaths  of 
myrtle ;  but  Wordsworth  must  do  so  to  show 
us  how  he  means  to  tell  it,  and,  as  he  forgets 
to  mention,  so  that  he  may  rhyme  with  Kirtle. 
That  is  all  professionalism,  all  a  device  for 
making  expression  easy,  practised  by  a  great 
poet  because  at  the  moment  he  had  nothing  to 
express.  But  art  is  always  difficult  and  cannot 
be  made  easy  by  this  means.  We  need  not 
take  a  malicious  pleasure  in  such  lapses  of  the 
great  poet ;  but  it  is  well  to  know  when  Homer 
nods,  even  though  he  uses  all  his  craft  to  pre- 
tend that  he  is  wide  awake.  Criticism  may 
have  a  negative  as  well  as  a  positive  value.  It 
may  set  us  on  our  guard  against  professional- 
ism even  in  the  greatest  artists,  and  most  of 
all  in  them.  For  it  is  they  who  begin  profes- 
sionalism and,  with  the  mere  momentum  of 
their  vitality,  make  it  attractive.  Because 
they  are  great  men  and  really  accomplished, 
they  can  say  nothing  with  a  grand  air;  and 
these  grand  nothings  of  theirs  allure  us  just 
because  they  are  nothings  and  make  no 
125 


Essays  on  Art 

demands  upon  our  intelligence.  That  is  art 
indeed,  we  cry :  and  we  intoxicate  ourselves  with 
it  because  it  is  merely  art.  "The  quality  of 
mercy  is  not  strained"  is  far  more  popular 
than  Lear's  speech,  "  No,  no,  no  !  Come,  let's 
away  to  prison,""  because  it  is  professional 
rhetoric ;  it  is  what  Shakespeare  could  write 
at  any  moment,  whereas  the  speech  of  Lear  is 
what  Lear  said  at  one  particular  moment.  The 
contrast  between  the  two  is  the  contrast  well 
put  in  the  epigram  about  Barry  and  Garrick 
in  their  renderings  of  King  Lear : — 

A  king,  aye,   every   inch   a  king,   such   Barry  doth 

appear. 
But  Garrick's  quite  another  thing ;  he's  every  inch 

King  Lear. 

We  admire  the  great  artist  when  he  is  every 
inch  a  king  more  than  when  he  has  lost  his 
kingship  in  his  passion. 

He  no  doubt  knows  the  difference  well 
enough.  But  he  wishes  to  do  everything  well, 
he  has  a  natural  human  delight  in  his  own 
accomplishment ;  and  a  job  to  finish.  Shake- 
speare, Michelangelo,  Beethoven  were  not 
slaves  to  their  own  professionalism ;  no  doubt 
they  could  laugh  at  it  themselves.  But  there 
is  always  a  danger  that  we  shall  be  enslaved  by 
it ;  and  it  is  the  business  of  criticism  to  free  us 

136 


Professionalism  in  Art 

from  that  slavery,  to  make  us  aware  of  this  last 
infirmity  of  great  artists.  We  are  on  our  guard 
easily  enough  against  a  professionalism  that  is 
out  of  fashion.  The  Wagnerian  of  a  genera- 
tion ago  could  sneer  at  the  professionalism  of 
Mozart ;  but  the  professionalism  of  Wagner 
seemed  to  him  to  be  inspiration  made  constant 
and  certain  by  a  new  musical  invention.  We 
know  now  only  too  well,  from  Wagner's  imita- 
tors, that  he  did  not  invent  a  new  method  of 
tapping  inspiration  ;  we  ought  to  know  that  no 
one  can  do  that.  The  more  complete  the 
method  the  more  tiresome  it  becomes,  even  as 
practised  by  the  inventor. 

Decadence  in  art  is  always  caused  by  pro- 
fessionaHsm,  which  makes  the  technique  of  art 
too  difficult,  and  so  destroys  the  artist's  energy 
and  joy  in  his  practice  of  it.  Teachers  of  the 
arts  are  always  inclined  to  insist  on  their  diffi- 
culty and  to  set  hard  tasks  to  their  pupils  for 
the  sake  of  their  hardness  ;  and  often  the  pupil 
stays  too  long  learning  until  he  thinks  that 
anything  which  is  difficult  to  do  must  therefore 
be  worth  doing.  This  notion  also  overawes 
the  general  public  so  that  they  value  what 
looks  to  them  difficult ;  but  in  art  that  which 
seems  difficult  to  us  fails  with  us,  we  are  aware 
of  the  difficulty,  not  of  the  art.  The  greater 
127 


Essays  on  Art 

the  work  of  art  the  easier  it  seems  to  us.  We 
feel  that  we  could  have  done  it  ourselves  if  only 
we  had  had  the  luck  to  hit  upon  that  way  of 
doing  it ;  indeed,  where  our  aesthetic  experience 
of  it  is  complete,  we  feel  as  if  we  were  doing  it 
ourselves;  our  minds  jump  with  the  artist's 
mind ;  we  are  for  the  moment  the  artist  him- 
self in  his  very  act  of  creation.  But  we  are 
always  apt  to  undervalue  this  true  and  complete 
aesthetic  experience,  because  it  seems  so  easy 
and  simple,  and  we  mistake  for  it  a  painful 
sense  of  the  artist's  skill,  of  his  professional 
accomplishment.  So  we  demand  of  artists 
that  they  shall  impress  us  with  their  accomplish- 
ment; we  have  not  had  our  money's  worth 
unless  we  feel  that  we  could  not  possibly  do 
ourselves  what  they  have  done.  No  doubt, 
when  the  Songs  of  Innocence  were  first  pub- 
lished, anyone  who  did  happen  to  read  them 
thought  them  doggerel.  Blake  in  a  moment 
had  freed  himself  from  all  the  professionalism 
of  the  followers  of  Pope,  and  even  now  they 
make  poetry  seem  an  easy  art  to  us,  until  we 
try  to  write  songs  of  innocence  ourselves : — 

When  the  voices  of  children  are  heard  on  the  green, 
And  laughing  is  heard  on  the  hill, 

My  heart  is  at  rest  within  my  breast, 
And  everything  else  is  still. 

128 


Professionalism  in  Art 

"Then  come  home,  my  children,  the  sun  is  gone 
down, 

And  the  dews  of  night  arise  ; 
Come,  come,  leave  off  play,  and  let  us  away. 

Till  the  morning  appears  in  the  skies." 

We  call  it  artless,  with  still  a  hint  of  deprecia- 
tion in  the  word,  or  at  least  of  wonder  that  we 
should  be  so  moved  by  such  simple  means. 
It  is  a  kind  of  cottage-poetry,  and  has  that 
beauty  which  in  a  cottage  moves  us  more  than 
all  the  art  of  palaces.  But  we  never  learn 
the  lesson  of  that  beauty  because  it  seems  to 
us  so  easily  won ;  and  so  our  arts  are  always 
threatened  by  the  decadence  of  professionalism. 
But  poetry  in  England  has  been  a  living  art 
so  long  because  it  has  had  the  power  of  freeing 
itself  from  professionalism  and  choosing  the 
better  path  with  Mary  and  with  Ruth.  The 
value  of  the  Romantic  movement  lay,  not  in 
its  escape  to  the  wonders  of  the  past,  but  in  its 
escape  from  professionalism  and  all  its  self- 
imposed  and  easy  difficulties.  For  it  is  much 
easier  to  write  professional  verses  in  any  style 
than  to  write  songs  of  innocence ;  and  that  is 
why  professionalism  in  all  the  arts  tempts  all 
kinds  of  artists.  Anyone  can  achieve  it  who 
has  the  mind.  It  is  a  substitute  for  expression, 
as  mere  duty  is  a  substitute  for  virtue.  But,  as 
I  129 


Essays  on  Art 

a  forbidding  sense  of  duty  makes  virtue  itself 
seem  unattractive,  so  professionalism  destroys 
men's  natural  delight  in  the  arts.  Like 
the  artist  himself,  his  public  becomes  anxious, 
perverse,  exacting ;  afraid  lest  it  shall  admire 
the  wrong  thing,  because  it  has  lost  the  im- 
mediate sense  of  the  right  thing.  Just  as  it 
expects  art  to  be  difficult,  so  it  expects  its  own 
pleasure  in  art  to  be  difficult;  and  thus  we 
have  attained  to  our  present  notion  about  art 
which  is  like  the  Puritan  notion  about  virtue, 
that  it  is  what  no  human  being  could  possibly 
enjoy  by  nature.  And  if  we  do  enjoy  it,  "like  a 
meadow  gale  in  spring,"  it  cannot  be  good  art. 
But  in  painting  as  in  poetry,  all  the  new 
movements  of  value  are  escapes  from  pro- 
fessionalism ;  and  they  begin  by  shocking  the 
public  because  they  seem  to  make  the  art  too 
easy.  Dickens  was  horrified  by  an  early  work 
of  Millais ;  Ruskin  was  enraged  by  a  nocturne 
of  Whistler.  He  said  it  was  cockney  impudence 
because  it  lacked  the  professionalism  he  expected. 
Artists  and  critics  alike  are  always  binding 
burdens  on  the  arts ;  and  they  are  always 
angry  with  the  artist  who  cuts  the  burden  off' 
his  back.  They  think  he  is  merely  shirking 
difficulties.  But  the  difficulty  of  expression  is 
so  much  greater  than  the  self-imposed  diffi- 
130 


Professionalism  in  Art 

culties  of  mere  professionalism  that  any  man 
who  is  afraid  of  difficulties  will  try  to  be  a  pro- 
fessional rather  than  an  artist. 

In  art  there  is  always  humility,  in  profes- 
sionalism pride.  And  it  is  this  pride  that 
makes  art  more  ugly  and  tiresome  than  any 
other  work  of  man.  Nothing  is  stranger  in 
human  tiature  than  the  tyranny  of  boredom 
it  will  endure  in  the  pursuit  of  art;  and 'the 
more  bored  men  are,  the  more  they  are  convinced 
of  artistic  salvation.  Our  museums  are  cum- 
bered with  monstrous  monuments  of  past  pro- 
fessionalism ;  our  bookshelves  groan  with  them. 
Always  we  are  trying  to  like  things  because 
they  seem  to  us  very  well  done;  never  do  we 
dare  to  say  to  ourselves  :  It  may  be  well  done, 
but  it  were  better  if  it  were  not  done  at  all ; 
and  the  artist  is  still  to  us  a  dog  walking  on  his 
hind  legs,  a  performer  whose  merit  lies  in  the 
unnatural  difficulty  of  his  performance. 


131 


Waste  or  Creation?    ^s>       <?        ^       -^ 

THE  William  Morris  Celebration  was  not 
so  irrelevant  to  these  times  as  it  may 
seem.  Morris  was  always  foretelling  a  catas- 
trophe to  our  society,  and  it  has  come.  That 
commercial  system  of  ours,  which  seems  to  so 
many  part  of  the  order  of  Nature,  was  to  him 
as  evil  and  unnatural  as  slavery.  His  quarrel 
with  it  was  not  political,  but  human ;  it  was 
the  quarrel  not  of  the  oppressed,  for  he  was 
not  the  man  to  be  oppressed  in  any  society,  but 
of  the  workman.  He  was  sure  that  a  society 
which  encouraged  bad  work  and  discouraged 
good  must  in  some  way  or  other  come  to  a  bad 
end ;  and  he  would  have  seen  in  this  war  the 
end  that  he  predicted.  Whatever  its  result, 
there  must  be  a  change  in  the  order  of  our 
society,  whether  it  sinks  through  incessant 
wars,  national  and  commercial,  into  barbarism 
or  is  shocked  into  an  effort  to  attain  to  civiliza- 
tion. There  were  particular  sayings  of  Morris's 
to  which  no  one  at  the  time  paid  much  heed. 
They  seemed  mere  grumblings  against  what 
must  be.  He  was,  for  instance,  always  crying 
132 


Waste  or  Creation  ? 

out  against  our  waste  of  labour.  If  only  all 
men  did  work  that  was  worth  doing — 

Think  what  a  change  that  would  make  in 
the  world !  I  tell  you  I  feel  dazed  at  the 
thought  of  the  immensity  of  the  work  which 
is  undergone  for  the  making  of  useless  things. 
It  would  be  an  instructive  day's  work,  for  any 
one  of  us  who  is  strong  enough,  to  walk 
through  two  or  three  of  the  principal  streets 
of  London  on  a  weekday,  and  take  accurate 
note  of  everything  in  the  shop  windows  which 
is  emban-assing  or  superfluous  to  the  daily  life 
of  a  serious  man.  Nay,  the  most  of  these 
things  no  one,  serious  or  unserious,  wants  at 
all ;  only  a  foolish  habit  makes  even  the 
lightest-minded  of  us  suppose  that  he  wants 
them  ;  and  to  many  people,  even  of  those  who 
buy  them,  they  are  obvious  encumbrances  to 
real  work,  thought,  and  pleasure. 

At  the  time  most  people  said  that  this  waste 
of  labour  was  all  a  matter  of  demand  and 
supply,  and  thought  no  more  about  it;  some 
said  that  it  was  good  for  trade.  Very  few  saw, 
with  Morris,  that  demand  for  such  things  is 
something  willed  and  something  that  ought 
not  to  be  willed. 

But  then  it  was  generally  believed  that  we 
could  afford  this  waste  of  labour;  and  so  it 
went  on  until,  after  a  year  or  two  of  war,  we 
found  that  we  could  not  afford  it.  Then  even 
the   most   ignorant   and   thoughtless   learned, 

133 


Essays  on  Art 

from  facts,  not  from  books,  certain  lessons  of 
political  economy.  They  learned  that,  in  war- 
time at  least,  a  nation  that  wastes  its  labour 
will  be  overcome  by  one  that  does  not.  At 
once  the  common  will  was  set  against  the  waste 
of  labour ;  and,  wTiat  would  have  seemed 
strangest  of  all  forty  years  ago,  the  Govern- 
ment, with  the  consent  of  the  people,  set  to 
work  to  stop  the  waste  of  labour,  and  did  to 
a  great  extent  succeed  in  stopping  it.  When 
people  thought  in  terms  of  munitions,  instead 
of  in  terms  of  general  well-being,  they  saw  that 
the  waste  of  labour  must  be,  and  could  be, 
stopped.  They  talked  no  longer  about  the 
laws  of  supply  and  demand,  but  about  muni- 
tions. Those  who  had  made  trash  must  be 
set  to  make  munitions,  or  to  fight,  or  in  some 
way  to  second  the  Army.  Those  who  still 
were  ready  to  waste  labour  on  trash  for  them- 
selves were  no  longer  obeying  the  laws  of 
supply  and  demand ;  they  were  diverting 
labour  from  its  proper  task ;  they  were  un- 
patriotic, they  were  helping  the  Germans. 
Money,  in  fact,  had  no  longer  the  right  to 
an  absolute  command  over  labour.  A  man, 
before  he  spent  a  sovereign,  must  ask  himself 
whether  he  was  spending  it  for  the  good  of  the 
nation  ;  and  if  he  did  not  ask  himself  that,  the 
Government  would  ask  it  for  him. 

134 


Waste  or  Creation  ? 

So  much  the  war  taught  us,  for  purposes  of 
war.  But  Morris  many  years  ago  tried  to 
teach  it  for  purposes  of  peace.  When  he 
wrote  those  words  which  we  have  quoted,  he 
was  not  talking  politics  but  ordinary  common 
sense.  He  was  not  even  talking  art,  but  rather 
economics ;  and  he  was  talking  it  not  to  any 
vague  abstraction  called  the  community,  but 
to  each  individual  human  being.  At  that  time 
every  one  thought  of  economics  as  something 
which  concerned  society  or  the  universe.  It 
was,  so  to  speak,  a  natural  science ;  it  observed 
phenomena  as  if  they  were  in  the  heavens ;  and 
stated  laws  about  them,  laws  not  human  but 
natural.  Perhaps  it  was  the  greatest  achieve- 
ment of  Morris  in  the  way  of  thought  that  he 
saw  economics,  even  more  clearly  than  Ruskin, 
as  a  matter  not  of  natural  laws,  but  of  con- 
science and  duty.  He  did  not  talk  about 
economics  at  all,  but  about  the  waste  of  labour, 
just  as  we  talk  about  it  now.  The  only  differ- 
ence is  that  he  saw  it  to  be  one  of  the  chief 
causes  of  poverty  in  time  of  peace,  whereas  we 
see  it  as  a  hindrance  to  victory  in  time  of  war. 
We  have,  for  war  purposes,  acquired  the  con- 
science that  he  wished  us  to  acquire  for  all 
purposes.  The  question  is  whether  we  shall 
keep  it  in  peace. 

Upon  that  depends  the  (question  how  soon 

135 


Essays  on  Art 

we  shall  recover  from  the  war.  For  there  is 
no  doubt  that  we  shall  not  be  able  to  afford 
our  former  waste  of  labour ;  and,  if  we  persist 
in  it,  we  shall  be  bankrupt  as  a  society.  It 
may  be  said  that  we  shall  not  have  the  money, 
the  power,  to  waste  labour.  But  we  shall  cer- 
tainly have  some  superfluous  energy,  more  and 
more,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  as  time  goes  on ;  and 
our  future  recovery  will  depend  upon  the  use 
we  make  of  this  superfluous  energy.  We  can 
waste  it,  as  we  wasted  it  before  the  war ;  or  we 
can  keep  the  conscience  we  have  acquired  in 
war  and  ask  ourselves  in  peace,  with  every 
penny  we  spend,  whether  we  are  wasting 
labour.  It  is  true  that  what  may  be  waste  to 
one  will  not  be  waste  to  another ;  but  in  that 
matter  every  one  must  obey  his  own  conscience. 
The  important  thing  is  that  every  one  should 
have  a  conscience  and  obey  it.  There  will  be 
plenty  of  people  to  tell  us  that  no  one  can 
define  waste  of  labour.  No  one  can  define  sin  ; 
but  each  man  has  his  own  conscience  on  that 
point  and  lives  well  or  ill  as  he  obeys  it  or  dis- 
obeys it.  Besides,  there  are  many  things,  all 
the  trash  that  Morris  speaks  about  in  the  shop 
windows,  that  every  one  knows  to  be  waste. 
We  need  not  trouble  ourselves  about  the  fact 
that  art  will  seem  waste  to  the  philistine  and 
not  to  the  artist.     We  must  allow  for  differ- 

136 


Waste  or  Creation  ? 

ences  on  that  point  as  on  most  others.  Some 
things  that  might  have  been  waste  to  Samuel 
Smiles  would  have  been  to  Morris  a  symptom 
of  well-being.  But  he  knew,  and  often  said, 
that  we  cannot  have  the  beauty  which  was  to 
him  a  symptom  of  well-being  unless  we  end  the 
waste  of  labour  on  trash.     Of  luxury  he  said : — 

By  those  who  know  of  nothing  better  it  has 
even  been  taken  for  art,  the  divine  solace  of 
human  labour,  the  romance  of  each  day's  hard 
practice  of  the  difficult  art  of  living.  But  I 
say,  art  cannot  live  beside  it  nor  self-respect  in 
any  class  of  life.  Effeminacy  and  brutality  are 
its  companions  on  the  right  hand  and  the  left. 

There  is,  we  have  all  discovered  now,  only  a 
certain  amount  of  labour  in  the  country,  in  the 
world.  Even  the  most  ignorant  are  aware  at 
last  that  money  does  not  create  labour  but 
only  commands  it,  and  may  command  it  to  do 
what  will  or  will  not  benefit  us  all.  We  were, 
for  the  purposes  of  the  war,  much  more  of  a 
fellowship  than  we  had  ever  been  before.  We 
acknowledged  a  duty  to  each  other,  the  duty 
of  commanding  labour  to  the  common  good. 
We  asked  with  every  sovereign  we  spent 
whether  it  would  help  or  hinder  us  in  the  war. 
Morris  would  have  us  ask  also  whether  it  will 
help  or  hinder  us  in  the  advance  towards  a 
general  happiness. 

137 


Essays  on  Art 

And  he  put  a  further  question,  which  in 
time  of  war  unfortunately  we  could  not  put,  a 
question  not  only  about  the  work  but  about 
the  workman.  Are  we,  with  our  money,  forc- 
ing him  to  work  that  is  for  him  worth  doing ; 
are  we,  to  use  an  old  phrase,  considering  the 
good  of  his  soul  ?  Morris  insisted  on  our  duty 
to  the  workman  more  even  than  on  our  duty 
to  society.  He  saw  that  where  great  masses 
of  men  do  work  that  they  know  to  be  futile 
there  must  be  a  low  standard  of  work  and 
incessant  discontent.  The  workman  may  not 
even  know  the  cause  of  his  discontent.  He 
may  think  he  is  angry  with  the  rich  because 
they  are  rich ;  but  the  real  source  of  his  anger 
is  the  work  that  they  set  him  to  do  with  their 
riches.  And  no  class  war,  no  redistribution  of 
wealth,  will  end  that  discontent  if  the  same 
waste  of  labour  continues.  Double  the  wages 
of  every  workman  in  the  country,  and  if  he 
spends  the  increase  on  trash  no  one  will  be  any 
better  off'  in  mind  or  body.  There  will  still  be 
poverty  and  still  discontent,  with  the  work  if 
not  with  the  wages. 

The  problem  for  us,  for  every  modern  society 
now,  is  not  so  much  to  redistribute  wealth ; 
that  at  best  can  be  only  a  means  to  an  end ; 
but  to  use  our  superfluous  energy  to  the  best 
purpose,  no  longer  to  waste  it  piecemeal.  That 
138 


Waste  or  Creation  ? 

problem  we  solved,  to  a  great  extent,  in  war. 
We  have  to  solve  it  also  in  peace  if  the  peace 
is  to  be  woi'th  having  and  is  not  to  lead  to 
further  wars  at  home  or  abroad.  The  war 
itself  has  given  us  a  great  opportunity.  It  has 
opened  our  eyes,  if  only  we  do  not  shut  them 
again.  It  has  taught  every  one  in  the  country 
the  most  important  of  all  lessons  in  political 
economy  which  the  books  often  seem  to  con- 
ceal. And,  better  still,  it  has  taught  us  that 
in  economics  we  can  exercise  our  own  wills, 
that  they  concern  each  individual  man  and 
woman  as  much  as  morals ;  that  they  are 
morals,  and  not  abstract  mathematics ;  that 
we  have  the  same  duty  towards  the  country, 
towards  mankind,  that  we  have  to  our  own 
families.  The  proverb.  Waste  not,  want 
not,  does  not  apply  merely  to  each  private 
income.  We  have  accounts  to  settle  not  only 
with  our  bankers,  but  with  the  community. 
It  will  thrive  or  not  according  as  we  are  thrifty 
or  thriftless ;  and  our  thrift  depends  upon  how 
we  spend  our  income,  not  merely  on  how  much 
we  spend  of  it.  For  all  that  part  of  it  which  we 
do  not  spend  on  necessaries  is  the  superfluous 
energy  of  mankind,  and  we  determine  how  it 
shall  be  exercised ;  each  individual  determines 
that,  not  an  abstraction  called  society. 

One  may  present  the  thrift  of  labour  as  a 

139 


Essays  on  Art 

matter  of  duty  to  society.  But  Morris  saw 
that  it  was  more  than  that ;  and  he  lit  it  with 
the  sunlight  of  the  warmer  virtues.  It  is  not 
merely  society  that  we  have  to  consider,  or  the 
direction  of  its  superfluous  energy.  It  is  also 
the  happiness,  the  life,  of  actual  men  and 
women.  We  shall  not  cease  to  waste  work 
until  we  think  always  of  the  worker  behind  it, 
until  we  see  that  it  is  our  duty,  if  with  our 
money  we  have  command  over  him,  to  set  him 
to  work  worth  doing.  Capital  now  is  to  most 
of  those  who  own  it  a  means  of  earning  interest. 
We  should  think  of  it  as  creative,  as  the  power 
which  may  make  the  wilderness  blossom  like 
the  rose  and  change  the  slum  into  a  home  for 
men  and  women  ;  and,  better  still,  as  the  power 
that  may  train  and  set  men  to  do  work  that 
will  satisfy  their  souls,  so  that  they  shall  work 
for  the  work's  sake  and  not  only  for  the  wages. 
Until  capital  becomes  so  creative  in  the  hands 
of  those  who  own  it  there  will  always  be  a 
struggle  for  the  possession  of  it ;  and  to  those 
who  do  possess  it  it  will  bring  merely  super- 
fluities and  not  happiness.  If  it  becomes 
creative,  no  one  will  mind  much  who  possesses 
it.  The  class  war  will  be  ended  by  a  league  of 
classes,  their  aim  not  merely  peace,  but  those 
things  which  make  men  resolve  not  to  spoil 
peace  with  war. 

140 


Waste  or  Creation  ? 

We  shall  be  told  that  this  is  a  dream,  as  we 
are  always  told  that  the  ending  of  war  is  a 
dream.  "  So  long  as  human  nature  is  what  it 
is  there  will  always  be  war."  Those  who  talk 
thus  think  of  human  nature  as  something  not 
ourselves  making  for  unrighteousness.  It  is 
not  their  own  nature.  They  know  that  they 
themselves  do  not  wish  for  war ;  but,  looking 
at  mankind  in  the  mass  and  leaving  themselves 
out  of  that  mass,  they  see  it  governed  by  some 
force  that  is  not  really  human  nature,  but 
merely  nature  "red  in  tooth  and  claw,"  a 
process  become  a  malignant  goddess,  who  forces 
mankind  to  act  contrary  to  their  own  desires, 
contrary  even  to  their  own  interests.  She  has 
taken  the  place  for  us  of  the  old  original  sin ; 
and  the  belief  in  her  is  far  more  primitive  than 
the  belief  in  original  sin.  She  is  in  fact  but  a 
modern  name  for  all  the  malignant  idols  that 
savages  have  worshipped  with  sacrifices  of  blood 
and  tears  that  they  did  not  wish  to  make.  It 
is  strange  that,  priding  oiu^elves  as  we  do  on 
our  modern  scepticism  which  has  taught  us  to 
disbelieve  in  the  miracle  of  the  Gadarene  swine, 
we  yet  have  not  dared  to  affirm  the  plain  fact 
that  this  nature,  this  human  nature,  does  not 
exist.  There  is  no  force,  no  process,  whether 
within  us  or  outside  us,  that  compels  us  to 
act  contrary  to  our  desires  and  our  interests. 
141 


Essays  on  Art 

There  is  nothing  but  fear;  and  fear  can  be 
conquered,  as  by  individuals,  so  by  the  collec- 
tive will  of  man.  It  is  fear  that  produces  war, 
the  fear  that  other  men  are  not  like  ourselves, 
that  they  are  hostile  animals  governed  utterly 
by  the  instinct  of  self-preservation. 

So  it  is  fear  that  produces  the  class  war  and 
the  belief  that  it  must  always  continue.  It  is 
our  own  fears  that  cut  us  off  from  happiness 
by  making  us  despair  of  it.  The  man  who  has 
capital  sees  it  as  a  means  of  protecting  himself 
and  his  children  from  poverty ;  it  is  to  him  a 
negative,  defensive  thing,  at  best  the  safeguard 
of  a  negative,  defensive  happiness.  So  others 
see  it  as  something  which  he  has  and  they  have 
not,  something  they  would  like  to  snatch  from 
him  if  they  could.  But  if  he  saw  capital  as  a 
creative  thing,  like  the  powers  of  the  mind, 
like  the  genius  of  the  artist,  then  it  would  be 
to  him  a  means  of  positive  happiness  both  for 
himself  and  for  others.  He  would  say  to  him- 
self, not  How  can  I  protect  myself  with  this 
against  the  tyranny  of  the  struggle  for  life.'' 
not  How  can  I  invest  this  r  but  What  can  I  do 
with  this.?  He  would  see  it  as  Michelangelo 
saw  the  marble  when  he  looked  for  the  shape 
within  it.  And  then  he  would  rise  above  the 
conception  of  mere  duty  as  something  we  do 
against  our  own  wills,  or  of  virtue  as  a  luxury 
142 


Waste  or  Creation  ? 

of  the  spirit  to  which  we  escape  in  our  little 
leisure  from  the  struggle  for  life.  Virtue,  duty, 
would  be  for  him  life  itself;  in  creation  he 
would  attain  to  that  harmony  of  duty  and 
pleasure  which  is  happiness. 

If  only  we  could  see  that  the  superfluous 
energy  of  mankind  is  something  out  of  which 
to  make  the  happiness  of  mankind  we  should 
find  our  own  happiness  in  the  making  of  it. 
There  is  still  for  us  a  gulf  between  doing  good 
to  others  and  the  delight  of  the  artist,  the 
craftsman,  in  his  work.  The  artist  is  one  kind 
of  man  and  the  philanthropist  another;  the 
artist  is  a  selfish  person  whom  we  like,  and  the 
philanthropist  an  unselfish  person  whom  we  do 
not  like.  What  we  need  is  to  fuse  them  in  our 
use  of  capital,  in  our  exercise  of  the  superfluous 
energy  of  mankind.  There  are  single  powerful 
capitalists  who  know  this  joy  of  creation,  who 
are  benevolent  despots,  and  yet  are  suspect  to 
the  poor  because  of  their  great  power.  But  it 
never  enters  the  head  of  the  smaller  investor 
that  he,  too,  might  create  instead  of  merely 
investing ;  that,  instead  of  being  a  shareholder 
in  a  limited  liability  company,  he  might  be  one 
of  a  creative  fellowship,  not  merely  earning 
dividends  but  transforming  cities,  exalting 
things  of  use  into  things  of  beauty,  giving  to 
himself  and  to  mankind  work  worth  doing  for 

143 


Essays  on  Art 

its  own  sake,  work  in  which  all  the  obsolete 
conflicts  of  rich  and  poor  could  be  forgotten  in 
a  commonwealth.  That  is  the  vision  of  peace 
which  our  sacrifices  in  the  war  may  earn  for  us. 
We  have  learned  sacrifice  and  the  joy  of  it; 
but,  so  far,  only  so  that  we  may  overcome  an 
enemy  of  our  own  kind.  There  remains  to  be 
overcome,  by  a  sacrifice  more  joyful  and  with 
far  greater  rewards,  this  other  old  enemy  not 
of  our  own  kind,  the  enemy  we  call  nature  or 
human  nature,  the  enemy  that  is  so  powerful 
merely  because  we  dare  not  believe  that  she 
does  not  exist. 


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